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Safety·August 2026·8 min

70 months in prison for faked certificates of analysis — the Paradigm Peptides case

myPeptides Team

70 months in prison for faked certificates of analysis — the Paradigm Peptides case

This is a report on a criminal case, not medical or legal advice, and not an invitation to obtain any substance. Everything below comes from the charging document, the prosecutors' announcement and the reporting; sources are at the end.

On Thursday 30 July 2026, US District Judge Cristal C. Brisco sentenced Matthew J. Kawa, 48, to 70 months in prison — just under six years, followed by a year of supervised release — in South Bend, Indiana. Kawa ran Paradigm Peptides, one of the better-known shops in the "research only" corner of the internet. His sister Jennifer L. Stechkober, 32, the business's main employee, got 16 months.

For a peptide vendor, that is a rare criminal penalty. The striking part, though, is not the length of the sentence. It is what Kawa admitted to: he forged certificates of analysis — the very documents half the industry waves around as proof of quality.

What Paradigm was

From April 2019 to March 2024, Paradigm Peptides sold peptides, SARMs and hCG through paradigmpeptides.com, shipping from Michigan City, Indiana. Prosecutors put the customer base at roughly 54,000 people across all 50 US states and 80 countries; the charging document values the unapproved drugs pushed into commerce at more than $3 million. Kawa agreed to forfeit $5 million in proceeds, and both defendants were ordered to pay $78,317.52 in restitution.

The website read the way plenty of shops still read today: made in America, 99% pure, third-party tested — with a line at the bottom saying it was all strictly for research.

None of it was true. Kawa imported the ingredients from China, India and other countries to addresses in Indiana and Illinois, had them packaged in Michigan City, and sold them as his own manufacture. Nothing was ever tested. In his plea he stated plainly that he "did not test the SARM products that my business sold to customers."

The watermark trick

The charging document lists six ways the pair misled regulators and customers. One of them should interest anyone who has ever downloaded a COA:

forging Certificates of Analysis associated with Paradigm products by editing the information and the watermarks on other businesses' Certificates of Analysis

That is not sloppiness. That is craft, applied deliberately. You take a real lab's PDF — letterhead, layout, watermark, everything that signals independence — swap the compound name and the numbers, then retouch the watermark so it points at your own shop. What the customer sees looks exactly like an outside verification.

The other five items complete the picture. They falsely presented the products as research chemicals not intended for human consumption. They claimed Paradigm was licensed and registered with the FDA. They claimed it manufactured and lab-tested its own products in the United States. They misstated what was actually in the SARMs. And outbound international parcels were declared to customs as "cosmetic samples" to slip past inspection.

What was actually in the vial

When the government tested six compounds sold as testosterone mimics, all six contained real testosterone — a prescription steroid hormone, and a controlled substance in the US. The charging document names two from 1 September 2023: what was sold as YK-11 was testosterone. What was sold as Ostarine (MK-2866) was testosterone.

This is where mislabelling turns into a health problem. Someone who thinks they are taking a SARM is not expecting a full androgen dose — not the effects, not the side effects, and certainly not a failed drug test.

The hCG followed the same pattern. From 2020 to March 2024, Kawa regularly imported shipments from abroad. On at least fifteen occasions he was notified that a parcel of hCG addressed to him had been stopped at the border as a misbranded drug. He kept going. The second count concerns exactly one such parcel, from 16 January 2024.

One customer who paid for it

Dan Murphy, then in his early thirties and working as a marketing consultant, started taking Paradigm SARMs in 2023 to put on muscle. Within months came insomnia, painful cystic acne, grandiose thinking, then paranoid delusions — he became convinced his wife was conspiring against him — and recurring suicidal thoughts. The medical assessment was steroid-induced psychosis.

He only learned why in February 2025, through a letter from investigators: what he had been taking contained testosterone. "I lost friends, family, colleagues, clients and almost lost my life," he said afterwards. Judge Brisco summed it up from the bench: Kawa "focused on what you wanted to build instead of thinking about the people," leaving "an incredible trail of harm."

The warnings started in 2020

What makes the case remarkable is how little of it was a surprise. The FDA had been sending warnings since 2020. On 30 March 2022 came a formal warning letter: Paradigm was marketing its SARMs and peptides with claims about preventing, treating and curing disease — cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, Lyme — which made them unapproved new drugs. The letter pointed specifically at the known risks of LGD-4033, Ostarine, GW-501516 and MK-677: life-threatening reactions, liver toxicity, raised risk of heart attack and stroke.

The shop then ran for another two years. In September 2023 the FDA seized products for testing, which is where the testosterone findings came from. On 20 March 2024 it was over.

The judgment, for the record

  • Case: United States of America v. Kawa et al., No. 3:25-cr-00091, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Indiana, South Bend Division
  • Counts: introducing unapproved new drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud and mislead (21 U.S.C. §§ 331(d), 333(a)(2)); plus, for Kawa, fraudulent importation (18 U.S.C. § 545)
  • Guilty plea: 10 December 2025 · Sentencing: 30 July 2026 · Judge: Cristal C. Brisco
  • Sentences: Kawa 70 months plus 1 year supervised release; Stechkober 16 months plus 1 year; $5m forfeiture, $78,317.52 restitution
  • Investigated by: FDA Office of Criminal Investigations and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service

How to read a COA

A certificate of analysis is a snapshot of one batch — no more than that, but no less either. What it is worth comes down to a handful of checkable things:

  1. Who issued it? An independent lab with a name, an address and a way to reach it. A PDF with no traceable sender is a picture, not evidence.
  2. Is there a batch number — and does it match the one on your vial? Without that link, the certificate belongs to some batch, just not necessarily yours.
  3. Does the date fit the batch? A two-year-old COA for a product that shipped last week makes no sense.
  4. Which method? HPLC answers "how pure"; mass spectrometry answers "which molecule". That gap is exactly where Paradigm lived: a clean purity number says nothing about whether the vial holds what the label claims.
  5. Can the lab confirm it? Reputable testing labs will answer a question about a report number. That single step would have exposed the forgeries.
  6. Red flags: identical purity figures across an entire catalogue, missing batch numbers, watermarks that do not match the named lab, and certificates delivered as screenshots rather than PDFs.

And the phrase that proved worthless in court: "for research use only" protects nobody — not the vendor from prosecution, not you from the contents. For the legal picture, see our overview of whether peptides are legal.

The irony at the end

Among the unapproved drugs listed in Kawa's charging document is BPC-157. One week before he was sentenced, an FDA advisory committee recommended releasing that very peptide for pharmacy compounding — against the advice of the agency's own scientists. We covered that vote here.

Same molecule, two worlds. In one, people argue about formulation standards, purity requirements and oversight. In the other, a repainted PDF gets emailed out. The difference between them is not chemistry. It is whether anyone is accountable in a way you can check.

Sources

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This article is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. myPeptides gives no dosing recommendations.