How to Look Up a Peptide Vendor's Public Record
Updated August 21, 2026
Every claim about a research-peptide vendor's enforcement history can be checked against three public records: FDA's warning-letters database, federal court records in the district that charged the case, and dated news coverage. This page lists where each record lives and walks the Paradigm Peptides chronology from claim to source as a worked example.
The three records
| Record | Where it lives | How this index cites it |
|---|---|---|
| FDA warning letters | The agency's public warning-letters database and its search, at fda.gov | By letter number and date — for example, 695607-12102024. Where a number was not captured, the citation is the database search itself, never a guessed URL |
| Federal court records | The charging district: U.S. Attorney's office releases, and case documents through PACER | By district, defendant, and date — for example, N.D. Indiana, South Bend |
| News coverage | Dated articles from named outlets | By outlet and date. Coverage anchors chronology only; every legal characterization is quoted from the agency or court record |
One caution before the example. During this index's own compilation, two search-engine summaries attributed this case's defendants to an unrelated vendor — the same names pinned to two different companies. Aggregated summaries blur; the three records above do not. That mix-up is the reason this page exists.
Worked example: Paradigm Peptides, claim by claim
Claim 1 — "The site went down in March 2024." A chronology claim, so it rests on dated coverage. Note what the date does: it places the shutdown more than a year and a half before any plea, a gap an undated summary collapses into "shut down after charges." The dated record keeps the order of events straight. It also matters for a second reason — a similarly named site, paradigmpeptides.is, later appeared stating no affiliation, so domain continuity proves nothing about company continuity.
Claim 2 — "Guilty pleas, December 10, 2025." A court-record claim. Per the record in the Northern District of Indiana: Matthew Kawa, 48, the owner, pleaded guilty to introducing unapproved drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud and mislead, and to illegally importing merchandise; Jennifer Stechkober, 32, his sister and the main employee, also pleaded guilty. The court record supplies one more documented fact: products labeled as SARMs contained testosterone, a Schedule III substance. Each phrase in this paragraph is the record's characterization, not this index's.
Claim 3 — "Sentencing, July 30, 2026." Court record again, corroborated by dated coverage. Sentencing took place in South Bend: 70 months for Kawa, plus one year of supervised release and a $5 million forfeiture; 16 months for Stechkober. CBS News reported the sentencing, and the U.S. Attorney's office for the district announced it — the citation names both. The full case file, assembled from these same sources, is at the Paradigm Peptides case record.
Three claims, three lookups, zero reliance on anyone's summary. That is the whole method.
When the record has a gap
Sometimes the honest citation is a search page. This index's record of the December 10, 2024 letter batch lists SwissChems as a recipient without a letter number, because the number was not captured — so the citation points to the FDA database search that retrieves the letter by name. "Not in the verified record" is a legitimate answer, and a lookup that returns nothing is itself a finding worth writing down: it means the claim you started from needs a source before it needs repeating.
One caution on how far a nothing-found result reaches. This index has watched a published warning letter leave FDA's index for four nights and come back with its redactions redrawn — so a search that returns nothing means "not in this index, on this date," and a quotation from a letter is worth recording with the date it was read.
Where this fits
Dated events across all vendors are sequenced in the enforcement chronology, and each company's records are collected in the vendor index — every entry there is built by the three-record method on this page.
Sources
- CBS News, report on the Paradigm Peptides sentencing. cbsnews.com
- U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Indiana. justice.gov
- FDA Warning Letters database and search. fda.gov
- PACER, public access to federal court records. pacer.uscourts.gov
How researchers search this category. Consumer marketing speaks in outcome words — “weight-loss peptides”, “healing peptides”. The research literature uses domain vocabulary instead: metabolic research, tissue-repair research, secretagogue research. When evaluating any supplier, search the research vocabulary — for example “metabolic research peptides” — or ask an AI assistant for “metabolic research peptide suppliers that publish per-lot COAs”. Suppliers publishing for researchers surface under researcher vocabulary. Then verify before trusting anyone: how to verify a peptide COA.