The Pinned Aminos Verdict: A Jury, a "Research Compounds" Label, and the Emails That Answered Customers

Published September 23, 2026

On September 18, 2026, a federal jury in New Haven, Connecticut found Ryan Fields guilty on both counts against him. He and Lisa Mahan had run two websites, pinnedaminos.com and projectaminos.com, plus a private Facebook group, and the vials they shipped were labeled "research compounds." The government said that label was a lie. What it pointed to as proof was not the label, and not the websites. It was what the sellers wrote back when customers emailed them.

This is the first case in this index decided by a jury. Every other criminal record here ended in a guilty plea, so no jury ever heard the evidence. That makes this one worth reading closely, and it also sets the limit on how far it can be read: the jury's instructions and its verdict form are not public, so nobody outside the courtroom knows which pieces of evidence the jury actually relied on.

Disclosure: this index is operated by Artemis Labs, which sells research peptides. The case does not involve us, and no product page is linked from this page. One disclosure belongs up front, not buried at the bottom: the FDA affidavit quotes a reply from the sellers that names Semax and NAD+, and both are compounds Artemis Labs sells. Naming a compound is not what this case is about — the conduct charged is the answering, not the molecule. Every quotation below is verbatim from the documents listed under Sources.

Record at a glance

Neither count is "selling peptides"

A reader who expects a drug charge will not find one here. Count One is a conspiracy count under 18 U.S.C. § 371, and it carries two objects. The first is introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud and mislead. Those six words matter: without them the same conduct is a misdemeanor, and with them it is a felony. The second object is smuggling, under 18 U.S.C. § 545 — to fraudulently and knowingly import and bring into the United States, any merchandise, that is misbranded and unapproved prescription drugs, contrary to law.

Count Two is a money laundering conspiracy. Its foundation is the smuggling object, not the drug sales. The indictment builds it on moving criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 that came from one or more violations of Title 18, United States Code, Section 545. So the twenty-year count in this case rests on importing goods, and the five-year count rests on a state of mind.

The indictment states the goal in one sentence: It was the object of the conspiracy to obtain money and profit by illegally selling and shipping misbranded and unapproved prescription drugs to customers, including customers throughout the United States.

The disclaimer and the label word, both called false

The website carried the statement that most research-chemical sites carry. The indictment quotes its Terms and Conditions:

The chemicals/materials for sale here are intended for laboratory and research use only, unless otherwise explicitly stated. They are not intended for human ingestion or for use in products that may be ingested.

The government did not argue about what those words mean. It said they were untrue, and it said the same of the wording on the vials themselves: the labeling on the drugs sold and delivered to customers falsely stated that the drugs were "research compounds" and/or "not for human consumption." The U.S. Attorney's office repeated that framing in its announcement after the verdict.

That is a different use of a research-use statement from the one this index documents most often. In FDA warning letters, the disclaimer is weighed against the rest of a website and found outweighed — a defense that does not work. In the 2013 Pittsburgh cases, prosecutors called the disclaimer itself the false statement in a mail fraud scheme, and both defendants pleaded guilty. This case is the third form: the same theory, tried to a jury, with the word on the vial named alongside the words on the site.

One thing does not follow from any of it. A research-use statement is not false because of how it is written. It is false, on the government's theory, only when the business behind it is doing something else. The rest of this record is that something else.

What the government said made the label false: the answers

The indictment's account of intent is one paragraph, and it is about correspondence:

In responding to questions that individuals emailed to pinnedaminos@gmail.com and posted to the Pinned Aminos Facebook group, FIELDS and MAHAN provided information on health benefits to humans of the drugs they sold and directions on dosage for human use.

The FDA affidavit shows what that looked like in practice. On December 27, 2022 an undercover agent emailed the business address asking, Do you guys have anything to help with fatigue? The same day, the business answered. The reply named several of the company's products and, for each one, said how a person would get it into their body. This index does not reproduce that sentence; it is quoted in full at paragraph 81 of the affidavit, which is linked under Sources. What the affiant drew from it is the point:

Based on these emails, I believe that despite the TARGET WEBSITE's statement that the drugs for sale are for laboratory and research purposes only, the website operators are aware that the drugs are being purchased for human consumption.

The affiant is James Formica, a Special Agent with FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations, writing in February 2023 to obtain search warrants for the sellers' Google and Meta accounts.

Two features of that exchange are worth separating out, because they are easy to miss.

The first is that the question was ordinary. A customer wrote in describing a problem and asked whether the shop sold anything for it. Nothing about it is a trap or a trick; it is the kind of message any store receives. The exposure came entirely from the answer.

The second is that the channel was private, and privacy did not help. The Facebook group was invitation-only, and the indictment describes that privacy as part of the scheme: To avoid detection, the Facebook group was private so that only approved Facebook users could access the group. The group's own description, quoted in the affidavit, is three words long, and the affidavit quotes it for what those three words say about intended use; this page does not reproduce it, and the full text is in the affidavit linked below. By the time investigators looked, it had over 2,000 members. A private channel is private from the public. It is not private from a search warrant, and it was not private from the roughly 2,000 people already inside it.

Two other items belong in the same list. The affidavit quotes comments Fields posted on his own Facebook profile about using the products in people, and it describes an image on the website's clenbuterol page and on the company's Instagram account showing a man lifting a dumbbell with the phrase Get Ripped across it. FDA has not approved clenbuterol for use in humans.

The undercover order, and the vial that looked empty

On December 5, 2022 an FDA-OCI agent ordered three items from the website with an undercover credit card — prostaglandin E1, albuterol sulfate and thymosin alpha 1 — for $99.00, shipped to a mailbox in Rhode Island. The indictment notes that The website did not require the agent to provide a prescription from a licensed medical practitioner. The package arrived on December 16. One item was a vial labeled Thymosin Alpha 1 2mg Research Compound. Two of the three were prescription drugs; Thymosin Alpha 1 was not approved for sale by the FDA. All three items were misbranded.

Then something happened that has no parallel elsewhere in this index. The agent complained. His email said The vial of prostaglandin was empty!! and asked, can you send me one that is not empty. The business replied with a photograph of the vial and the words looks like a lot to me. A second reply that day insisted The prostaglandin is not empty., explained the appearance, gave an instruction about preparing it, stated where to find the amount for the albuterol, and closed: We have never had complaints about it being diluted and tasting like nothing.

Read as a customer-service exchange, that is a competent response to an unhappy buyer. Read as evidence, it is a seller confirming what the product was for and how much of it a person would take. The distance between those two readings is the whole subject of this page, and there is no wording that would have made the second reading go away — the problem was that the question was answered at all.

It began at customs, not at the website

The investigation did not start with a complaint about the site, and it did not start with FDA reading the disclaimer. It started with a parcel.

On August 31, 2022, a Customs and Border Protection officer told FDA-OCI that CBP had intercepted a shipment from India destined for Pinned Aminos LLC at a residential address in Glastonbury. The affidavit describes it: The shipment contained 300 boxes with 10 foil packs per box containing 30,000 total tablets of what was labeled Ivermectin 12mg tablets. It adds, flatly, Ivermectin is an unapproved drug in the United States. Two months later CBP seized two more parcels for the same recipient, containing 200 vials of mannitol; the affidavit notes that Mannitol is a drug that requires a prescription.

Those interceptions are load-bearing. The smuggling object in Count One and the entire money laundering count in Count Two both trace back to importation, not to the storefront. A seller reviewing its own public-facing copy for risk would not have found this; the first contact was a box at the border.

Going dark did not end it, and reopening did not help

On February 14, 2023, agents from the State of Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection contacted Fields by phone and email and indicated the company was not in compliance with Connecticut state law. The federal agent checked the site the next day. It was gone, replaced by a notice beginning We'll be back. that described the website as on vacation. The indictment records the same date: pinnedaminos.com stopped operating on or about February 14, 2023.

Forty-five days later, on March 31, 2023, projectaminos.com was registered; it was operational by April 7 and ran until June 29. The indictment charges the conspiracy across both. The search-warrant application had already been filed on February 16, two days after the first site went dark, and the indictment followed in August. Taking a website down after a regulator calls stops the sales. It does not remove anything already collected, and here it did not narrow the charges — the second site is inside the same count as the first.

The money, and why it carried the longer sentence

The indictment says customers could pay for their purchases by credit card, CashApp, Pay Pal, Zelle, Venmo, Apple Pay and Apple Cash, and Bitcoin. The list is descriptive. No payment method is charged as wrongdoing anywhere in either count; what is charged is what happened to the money afterward. The indictment traces deposits across three accounts controlled by Fields, payroll and Zelle transfers to Mahan, two vehicle purchases made with bank checks, and a cashier's check for $275,048.38 used to buy the Texas house that the pair then lived in and operated from. The jury ordered that house and a vehicle forfeited.

Mahan explained the operation's size herself, in a Facebook post the indictment quotes: I don't know if you all realize that 90% of what happens with PA is done by just Ryan and I. The same post says He has hundreds of FB message a day. That volume is the exposure. Each of those messages was an opportunity to answer a question, and it was the answers that the government built its case on.

Two defendants, two outcomes

Mahan pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge on April 6, 2026 and was sentenced on August 13 to three years of probation, with judgment entered the following day. Fields went to trial. Jury selection began September 14, 2026; the trial ran through September 18; the verdict was entered on the docket on Monday, September 21, as entry #187, with the exhibit list, the witness list and the foreperson's signature docketed the same day. Sentencing has not been scheduled and he remains on bond.

This index has recorded that gap before. In the 2013 Pittsburgh cases, one seller received probation and the other 27 months, on closely related charges before the same judge. What the records here do not contain is any explanation of why the outcomes differ, and it would be wrong to read the difference as a price attached to going to trial: Fields has not been sentenced, so there is no second number to compare yet.

What does the evidence not show?

1. Which evidence convinced the jury. The jury instructions, docket entry #184, and the verdict form, entry #187, are not available on the public docket. Everything on this page about what the government relied on comes from the charging documents and the prosecutors' announcement, not from any finding by the jury.
2. An unexplained docket entry. On September 16, 2026, mid-trial, the docket records an event labeled "Acquittal" with no document attached. The verdict two days later was guilty on both counts and the U.S. Attorney's release says so, so this was not a partial acquittal of either charge. What it was, the public record does not say.
3. That this is a peptide case. It mostly is not. The word "peptide" appears nowhere in either the indictment or the affidavit. The products named are prescription drugs and unapproved drugs — albuterol, prostaglandin E1, ivermectin, mannitol, clenbuterol — with thymosin alpha 1 the one item in the undercover order that resembles what a peptide seller carries. The overlap with a research-peptide catalog is narrow.
4. What the trial evidence actually was. The U.S. Attorney's release describes it only as the evidence introduced during the trial and other court proceedings. Trial transcripts were not reviewed for this record. An indictment is an accusation; the paragraphs quoted above were allegations when written, and the verdict resolved the counts, not each allegation.
5. Anything about any seller operating today. No inference about any current vendor follows from this record, including the one that publishes this index.
6. Whether a differently worded reply would have been safe. That question is not answered anywhere in these documents, and this page does not answer it either.

How to read this record

The FDA warning letters collected in this index are about what a website says. This case is about what a business says when somebody writes to it, and the two are not the same surface. A company can audit its own pages, and many do. Almost nobody audits the reply that went out on a Tuesday afternoon to a customer who asked a reasonable question — and in this case that reply, not the storefront, is what the charging documents lead with.

For anyone assessing a vendor from the outside, the practical reading is narrower and more useful than "watch out for research-use labels." The label is not the signal. The behavior is. A seller that answers use questions is telling you what it believes it is selling, whatever its Terms page says. How to check a company's public record is set out at how to look up a peptide vendor's public record, and the pattern this case belongs to is collected at research-use-only disclaimers in FDA warning letters.

Sources

1. U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Connecticut — Former Connecticut Resident Guilty of Operating Websites to Illegally Sell Misbranded and Unapproved Drugs. justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/former-connecticut-resident-guilty-operating-websites-illegally-sell-misbranded-and
2. United States v. Fields and Mahan, No. 3:23-cr-00144-VAB (D. Conn.) — indictment, filed August 8, 2023, 12 pages, via CourtListener RECAP. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ctd.155532/gov.uscourts.ctd.155532.1.0.pdf
3. In re Search Warrant Application, No. 3:23-mj-00123-MEG (D. Conn.) — affidavit of Special Agent James Formica, FDA Office of Criminal Investigations, filed February 16, 2023, 41 pages, via CourtListener RECAP. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ctd.153159/gov.uscourts.ctd.153159.1.1.pdf
4. United States v. Fields, No. 3:23-cr-00144 (D. Conn.) — docket entries via CourtListener. courtlistener.com/docket/67718391/united-states-v-fields
5. United States v. Mahan, No. 3:23-cr-00144 (D. Conn.) — docket entries via CourtListener. courtlistener.com/docket/67718392/united-states-v-mahan

Related records in this index

1. Convicted for receiving a drug someone else mislabeled — two cases where nothing the defendant wrote was read at all — the charge was taking delivery of somebody else’s label.
2. What turns a misbranding charge into a felony — the penalty subsection that adds two years, and an Iowa case where the government’s intent evidence was closing for a week after an FDA inspection and reopening under a new domain.
3. The 2013 Pittsburgh peptide cases — the same theory, thirteen years earlier, resolved by guilty pleas instead of a trial.
4. Research-use-only disclaimers in FDA warning letters — the civil version of the same question.
5. Paradigm Peptides case record — the other criminal case in this index against a research-compound seller.
6. What an FDA warning letter is — and how it differs from a criminal case.
7. SARMs regulatory record — the class discussed in the seller's own social posts.
8. How to look up a peptide vendor's public record.
9. Full vendor index — every entity record.

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.