This page tracks seven research-peptide vendors that stopped selling. Paradigm Peptides (2024), Amino Asylum (2025) and Peptide Sciences (March 2026) closed after prosecution, a raid or a public quality collapse. In September 2026 Chemyo closed on the 8th, Eternal Peptides reportedly ended ordering on the 15th, and Chameleon Peptides closed on the 27th, telling customers its banks had received Visa notices. PeptidesDirect, an EU vendor, closed in early October. A site that later appears under one of these names is not an authorised successor unless the original domain says so.
What we read
The public Janoshik test history for retatrutide, semaglutide, and tirzepatide samples between December 2024 and April 2026; FDA-cited court filings for the Paradigm Peptides federal case (December 2025); contemporaneous r/Peptides threads from the 90 days preceding each of the three vendor shutdowns; and post-shutdown reporting on The Peptide Catalog and Muscle and Brawn. For the September 2026 closures we read each vendor's own site on 5 October 2026 where it loaded, local press on the South Dakota search, and the third-party closure trackers named in each row. This is a forensic synthesis, not a first-hand audit.
The shutdown cadence
Three of the top five US peptide vendors by traffic ceased operations between June 2025 and March 2026 — a roughly four-month cadence at the top of the market. The closures were not the result of a single regulatory action; each ended for different formal reasons. The underlying pattern is what the public data shows in common. See also our FDA peptide-enforcement timeline for the regulatory backdrop behind these closures.
| Vendor | Closed | Cause cited | Pre-warning visible? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amino Asylum | June 2025 | FDA raid; SARMs with testosterone | Partially |
| Paradigm Peptides | Mar 2024 (operations); plea Dec 2025; sentenced 30 Jul 2026 | Unapproved new drugs with intent to defraud; forged lab certificates; SARMs containing testosterone | Yes - FDA warning letters 2020 and 2022 |
| Peptide Sciences | March 6, 2026 | Quality collapse + federal pressure | Yes |
| PeptidesDirect (EU, added Oct 2026) | Late Sept / early Oct 2026 | None given; "ceased operations" | No |
| Chemyo (added Oct 2026) | 8 Sept 2026 | None given; vendor notice | No |
| Eternal Peptides (added Oct 2026) | 15 Sept 2026, per third-party reports | Planned wind-down, per reports | No |
| Chameleon Peptides (added Oct 2026) | 27 Sept 2026 | Visa notices to its banks, per the vendor's own email | No |
Case 1: Amino Asylum — June 2025
The federal charges that triggered the FDA raid concerned SARMs labeled products that contained testosterone — a controlled substance under 21 U.S.C. § 802(41). The peptide catalog was not the formal subject of the action.
Pre-shutdown signals that were visible:
- COA practices were inconsistent across product lines, with several product pages publishing what appeared to be the same generic in-house certificate dated months earlier than the order.
- Multiple r/Peptides threads in early 2025 flagged the SARM-line products with chemistries that did not match label.
- The vendor's response to community challenges was customer-service silence rather than substantive correction.
Pre-shutdown signals that were not visible:
- The internal compliance state that drew federal attention.
- The specific SKU that triggered the testing referral.
For an outside observer with only public data, the SARM-line discrepancies were a yellow flag for at least three months before the raid. Whether they constituted a predictable signal of a federal action specifically is harder to claim — federal enforcement timing is not observable from outside.
Case 2: Paradigm Peptides — operations ceased March 2024, sentenced July 2026
Paradigm is the case with a full public record attached, because it went all the way to sentencing. Operations ceased in March 2024 during a federal investigation. Owner Matthew Kawa and his sister Jennifer Stechkober pleaded guilty in 2025, and on 30 July 2026 Kawa was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison with a $5 million money judgment. Stechkober received 16 months. The court ordered $78,317.52 in restitution.
The charge was not what we originally recorded. Both pleaded to introducing unapproved new drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud and mislead, which describes the business rather than a single product line. Kawa admitted the company forged laboratory certificates, did not test products before selling them, and imported from China and India while advertising US manufacture. Government testing of six compounds sold as SARMs found all six contained testosterone.
Pre-shutdown signals that were visible:
- FDA warning letters in 2020 and 2022, published in a free public database, telling Kawa he was selling unapproved drugs. He sold for another two years.
- The same SARMs-versus-controlled-substance pattern that Amino Asylum had been raided for.
The learning here is sharper than the one we drew from Amino Asylum. The forged certificates mean that no amount of reading Paradigm's published COAs would have caught this. Only a check that routed around the vendor would have, and the warning-letter database is exactly that. We wrote up the verification method separately in forged COAs and a 70-month sentence.
Case 3: Peptide Sciences — March 6, 2026
Peptide Sciences was the most-recommended vendor on r/Peptides for most of the 2024–2025 window. Their closure was both the largest by reader impact and the one where the public COA data most clearly anticipated the shutdown.
The Janoshik record for Peptide Sciences retatrutide samples between December 2024 and March 2026 shows 37 tested samples with results that progressively diverged from label claims, including at least one batch that returned a mass-spec identity result inconsistent with retatrutide. The community discussion on r/Peptides escalated through the back half of 2025, with multiple users posting Janoshik QRs showing under-spec purity on what were marketed as premium SKUs.
Federal pressure followed the quality collapse rather than preceding it. The shutdown itself happened with little notice but the trailing data trend was visible to anyone reading the public Janoshik database in mid-2025.
Update, October 2026: a fourth closure, with no warning at all
On 5 October 2026 we received a short notice from PeptidesDirect, a Cyprus-registered vendor that shipped research peptides inside the EU: the company has ceased operations and asked not to be listed. We had no page, draft, or link for them, so there was nothing to take down. We are recording the closure here because it breaks the pattern the first three cases established.
What the public record shows:
| Signal | Amino Asylum / Paradigm / Peptide Sciences | PeptidesDirect |
|---|---|---|
| Lifespan | Years | Roughly nine months (first public reviews January 2026, last September 2026) |
| Public Janoshik trail | Present, deteriorating | None under this vendor name in our mirror |
| Review score at closure | Falling, or drowned in complaints | 52 reviews, 4.7 of 5, 92 percent five-star |
| Stated cause | Raid, prosecution, quality collapse | None. "Ceased operations." |
| Positioning | Incumbents | Launched as the EU replacement for Peptide Sciences after the March 2026 shutdown |
| Site today | Placeholder, redirect, or seized | HTTP 410 Gone, the deliberate "this is permanent" status |
The last point is the one worth sitting with. PeptidesDirect built its marketing around the Peptide Sciences closure: EU shipping, Janoshik testing claimed on the storefront, and a blog that told displaced Peptide Sciences buyers where to go next. It outlived Peptide Sciences by about seven months.
Three things follow for readers.
- A clean review score is not a survival signal. The four signals below were all absent here. A vendor can be well reviewed, ship on time, and still be gone the following month. Review platforms measure the last order, not the balance sheet or the regulator's inbox.
- Short-lived vendors do not accumulate a public test history. None of the Janoshik checks in the reader checklist can be run on a vendor that has no entries under its own name. Treat an empty public record as an unknown, not as a pass.
- A 410 is the honest way to close. The domain does not resolve to a successor, a "we moved" page, or a lookalike. That is better than what peptidesciences.com did. If a site claiming to be PeptidesDirect appears later, treat it as unrelated.
Two unrelated businesses share the name: a US storefront at peptidesdirect.com and an Australian one at peptidesdirect.com.au. The closure notice concerns only the EU operation at the .io domain. We are not linking to any of the three.
Which peptide vendors closed in September 2026?
Three vendors stopped taking orders in a 19-day window, and a fourth went dark after a federal search near its listed address.
| Vendor | Date | Stated reason | Source type | Last COA in our mirrors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chemyo | 8 Sep 2026 | None given. Orders placed before 8 September "will be fulfilled as normal" | Vendor notice, chemyo.com, read 5 Oct 2026 | None under this name |
| Eternal Peptides | 15 Sep 2026 (ordering ended), support to 30 Sep | Planned wind-down, per reports | Secondary: The Peptide Catalog, 22 Sep 2026. eternalpeptides.com returned an error when we tried it on 5 Oct | None under this name |
| Chameleon Peptides | 27 Sep 2026 | Banks received Visa notices, per the vendor's customer email | Vendor email as quoted by compoundreview.com (secondary); storefront read "closed for new purchases" on 5 Oct | None in our mirrors; the storefront links its own Janoshik and Vanguard reports |
| Apex Peptides | Banner seen late Sep 2026 | None given; "Temporarily Closed" | Third-party trackers; cause unconfirmed | None under this name |
Chemyo is the cleanest case on paper. Its notice gives a date, says existing orders ship, names one support address, and says: "No other website is currently authorized to represent Chemyo or to collect personal information on Chemyo's behalf." It does not say why it closed.
Eternal Peptides advertised a lab-test page for every product. Reports say the test archive was still online on 22 September. If you bought from Eternal and relied on its COAs, save copies now. A vendor-hosted archive disappears with the domain. We could not load the site on 5 October to check.
Chameleon Peptides is the first vendor we know of to name card-network pressure as its reason. According to the email quoted by compoundreview.com, Chameleon said it had "decided to end operations" after its underwriting banks received notices from Visa questioning whether its sales reached only research customers. We have not seen those notices. The same source reports that on 1-2 October Chameleon reopened for existing account holders only, at 50% off, taking Bitcoin and Zelle. On 5 October the storefront read "Chameleon Peptides is now closed for new purchases" and let existing customers sign in to view order history and lab reports.
Losing the card rail changes the buyer's position more than the price does. A card payment can be disputed. Bitcoin and Zelle cannot. Lilly's 12 August release had asked "credit card companies, payment processors" to cut off retatrutide sellers (Lilly); whether Visa's notices to Chameleon's banks connect to that call is not something the public record shows. We are adding "payment-network exit" as a failure mode to our vendor failure taxonomy.
Apex Peptides is the one we can say least about. On 23 September federal agents led by the US Postal Inspection Service searched Apex Waste Management at 503 Prosperity Way, North Sioux City, SD, and a Dakota Dunes home (KTIV). KTIV later found the same owners listed on an LLC named Apex Peptides (KTIV, 24 Sep). Third-party trackers report that apex-peptides.com shows a "Temporarily Closed" banner and the Prosperity Way address in its footer. When we loaded it on 5 October we saw only a support widget. No agency has named the storefront or said what the search was about. An unrelated client called "Apex Pharma.io" appears in our Janoshik mirror; we have no basis to link the two. What is and is not known, as of 10 October, is in what happened to Apex Peptides.
None of the three confirmed closures left a public COA trail under its own name in our Janoshik or Kovera mirrors. That repeats the PeptidesDirect finding above: the four-signal checklist below cannot fire on a vendor whose tests were published only on its own site.
Is a site using the old name a successor?
Assume not. Chemyo's notice says so outright, and adds that it "no longer accepts payments through any website, person, or entity." After the Peptide Sciences closure, US searches for "peptide sciences labs" grew more than 150-fold year on year (DataForSEO, August 2026), the demand lookalike domains feed on. Our Peptide Sciences profile tracks that case.
Before you pay a site that claims to continue a closed vendor:
- Check the original domain. If chemyo.com or chameleonpeptides.com does not name the new site, it is not authorised.
- Check the registration date. A domain registered after the closure date is a new business, whatever its logo says.
- Check the COAs. A "successor" reusing the old vendor's certificates is reusing someone else's batch. Resolve each one on the lab's own server.
- Check payment methods. Crypto-only or Zelle-only checkout on a "relaunch" removes your chargeback right. Chameleon asked us for coverage twice in September, ten days before it closed; the full list of vendors that pitched us is in the affiliate offers we declined.
Alias networks that run several storefronts on shared infrastructure are covered in why peptide vendors run alias clusters.
What the data shows in common
Across the three US closures, four signals appeared in some combination (the October 2026 EU case above showed none of them, which is its own finding):
- Sustained adverse Janoshik results on flagship SKUs (visible for Peptide Sciences; less so for Amino Asylum, where the SARM-line was the catalyst).
- Inconsistent COA cadence — vendors switching between batch-specific and generic certificates as scrutiny increased.
- Customer-service silence on substantive product challenges, replaced by promotional response patterns.
- Catalog overlap with already-actioned vendors in the SARM category specifically.
None of these is a single-shot prediction. In combination, sustained across 60–90 days, they constitute a reasonable risk signal for the audit-side observer.
Reader checklist
If you are about to place a recurring order with a vendor:
- Pull the last 90 days of Janoshik public tests for the SKUs you buy most. If the trend across 5+ samples shows declining purity or inconsistent identity, treat the vendor as elevated-risk regardless of their headline COA.
- Check if the catalog includes SARMs marketed alongside peptides. Two of the three closures came through the SARM/controlled-substance side of mixed catalogs. Pure-peptide vendors carried less of this shutdown risk in 2025–2026.
- Watch customer-service tone on substantive challenges. Vendors that respond promotionally to specific product questions are showing a discipline gap that often precedes other discipline gaps.
What we did not read
We do not have access to vendor-internal compliance documentation, non-public sealed court filings, or the full chain-of-custody for the Janoshik samples we cite. The next iteration of this piece will benefit from r/Peptides moderator-side data on which threads were removed for defamation claims — a useful proxy for vendor-side legal pressure that is invisible from the reader-facing forum.
Sources
- Janoshik public tests database
- Why Peptide Sciences shut down (March 2026) — The Peptide Catalog
- Amino Asylum FDA raid — Muscle and Brawn
- Every peptide vendor that shut down 2025–2026
- Why did Peptide Sciences shut down? — PeptideLaws
- PeptidesDirect reviews — Trustpilot (52 reviews, January to September 2026, retrieved 5 October 2026)
- Chemyo official notice, read 5 October 2026
- Chameleon Peptides closure and customer email, compoundreview.com (secondary); chameleonpeptides.com read 5 October 2026
- KTIV, North Sioux City search, 23 September 2026, and Apex-tied businesses, 24 September 2026
- Lilly news release, 12 August 2026
- Closure notice from PeptidesDirect support, received by vialaudit on 5 October 2026; peptidesdirect.io returned HTTP 410 the same day
Frequently asked
Which peptide vendors closed in September 2026?
Chemyo announced a permanent closure dated 8 September 2026. Eternal Peptides reportedly ended web ordering on 15 September with support to 30 September; we have not seen that notice ourselves. Chameleon Peptides closed to new purchases on 27 September. Apex Peptides showed a "Temporarily Closed" banner after a 23 September federal search nearby, cause unconfirmed.
Why did Chameleon Peptides shut down?
According to the customer email quoted by compoundreview.com, Chameleon said its underwriting banks had received notices from Visa questioning whether its sales reached only research customers. We have not seen the Visa notices. On 5 October 2026 the storefront read "closed for new purchases", with existing customers able to sign in.
Is a website using a closed vendor's name a successor?
Treat it as unrelated unless the original domain names it. Chemyo's own notice says no other website is authorised to represent it and that it no longer accepts payments anywhere. Lookalike domains appeared after the Peptide Sciences closure. Do not send payment or personal data to a "relaunched" storefront.
Did Apex Peptides get raided?
Unconfirmed. KTIV reported a Postal Inspection Service-led search on 23 September 2026 at an Apex-named business in North Sioux City, South Dakota, whose owners are also listed on an LLC called Apex Peptides. No agency has named the peptide storefront or said what the search concerned.