Does it help that your supplier said it was tested? A distributor who told a federal agent exactly that agreed to forfeit $340,200

Reference page · published 2026-10-09

Disclosure: this index is operated by Artemis Labs, which sells research compounds to laboratories. Artemis Labs has no connection to any company or person named on this page, sells none of the products named here, and links no product page from this record. Nothing here is legal advice, and no outcome is predicted for anybody. Every quotation is verbatim from a federal court record, a federal statute, or a Justice Department release, each of which was fetched and read for this page on October 9, 2026, and each of which is listed under Sources. Two limits belong at the top, not buried at the bottom: one man on this page was charged and not convicted, and in the case the page is built around no sentence has been located — so the agreement to plead guilty is on the record, but whether a court accepted it and whether the agreed forfeiture was ever imposed are both unknown here.

Short answer: on the record read for this page, no — not by itself. The misdemeanor version of the federal misbranding offense does not ask whether you knew. An FDA criminal investigator wrote that rule into a sworn affidavit in plain words, recorded that the distributor said his supplier had told him the product was lab tested, and the United States charged him anyway. The statute does write a way out for somebody who only resold what somebody else packed — but the way out is a signed piece of paper with the supplier’s name and address on it, not an assurance. Across all four documents filed in the two related dockets, the word the statute uses for that paper appears zero times.

Most of the enforcement records in this index are about what a seller said. A product page, a blog post, a reply to a customer email: FDA reads the words and decides from them what the product was for. This page is about the other kind of case, the kind where nothing turns on anybody’s copy. Here the government read the ingredient list on a sealed pouch, compared it with what a laboratory found inside, and charged the man whose company put it on shelves.

That matters for anyone who buys finished goods from one supplier and resells them under their own brand — which is the shape of a great many businesses in this category, including ours. We already have a page on being convicted for a label you did not write, which covers a different clause of the same statute: the one about receiving mislabeled goods and passing them along. This page covers the clause for introducing them, and the escape written for it is a different and stricter one. The two are easy to confuse and they do not require the same thing.

What happened

On July 28, 2025, the United States filed a one-count Information and a signed plea agreement in the federal district court in Providence, Rhode Island, against Mahr Ahmed, 58, of Attleboro, Massachusetts, the president and sole owner of Noor, Inc. The company is described in the charging document as a supplier of general merchandise for distribution to convenience stores in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Hampshire. Nine days later, on August 6, 2025, a federal magistrate signed a criminal complaint against Jitender Behl, 74, of East Greenwich, Rhode Island — the man the government says imported the pills, packed them and sold them to Noor.

The product was a sealed foil pouch sold at convenience stores under the brand JMY, short for Just Me & You, and several other names. The Information says the pouches were marketed as “100% natural” male sexual performance enhancement supplements, that The labels of JMY included the phrases “male enhancement” and “unleash the bull.”, and that the printed ingredient list named things like ginseng, wild yam, saw palmetto, white willow bark and ashwagandha. Then comes the sentence the whole case rests on: Sildenafil citrate was not listed as an ingredient on the label or in any of the labeling of JMY or other products. Sildenafil citrate is the active ingredient in Viagra, and the Information states that drugs containing it are prescription drugs.

An undercover agent bought two pouches at a convenience store in West Warwick on October 26, 2022, for twelve dollars and eighty-two cents, and sent them to the FDA Forensic Chemistry Center. The affidavit records the result in one line: The sample was found to contain the active pharmaceutical ingredients sildenafil and ibuprofen. It then adds that The FDA approved Viagra containing the active pharmaceutical ingredient sildenafil does not contain ibuprofen. So the tablet in the pouch did not match the label, and it did not match the approved drug either.

On September 6, 2023, agents searched both men’s premises. At the supplier’s home and an outside shed they seized over 129,000 sildenafil pills, over 272,000 empty JMY bags, over 13,000 empty JMY boxes and two heat sealers. At Noor, Inc. they seized about 575 finished pouches, boxed for sale in groups of twenty-five. One of those is a packing operation. The other is stock on a shelf.

The sentence this page is about

The distributor was not there when his premises were searched — the affidavit records that Noor, Inc. was unoccupied. An agent reached him on a telephone number, and Ahmed volunteered to return to Noor Inc. to be interviewed. He said he owned the business and made its decisions. Then he said this, and the FDA agent swore it into the record:

Ahmed indicated that he has been purchasing the JMY product from BEHL for approximately seven years. According to Ahmed, he was unaware that JMY contained sildenafil and was told by BEHL that the JMY was lab tested and only contained natural products.

Read what that is and what it is not. It is a recorded statement, written down by an investigator in a sworn document, and nothing on this page establishes that it was true. What it establishes is something else and something firmer: the United States had this sentence in its own paperwork before it charged him, and charged him anyway. Twenty-two months after that interview, he agreed to plead guilty.

Why knowing nothing did not stop the charge

The reason is in the same affidavit, four paragraphs into the legal background, stated by the investigator in his own words, not left for a reader to go and look up:

Under the FDCA, the responsibility for ensuring that drugs are safe, effective, and properly labeled is placed on the manufacturer and those who distribute them. Misdemeanor offenses under the FDCA are strict liability offenses and do not require proof of knowledge or intent. Any person who commits any of the aforementioned prohibited acts with the intent to defraud or mislead commits a felony.

In plain terms: the statute has two settings. The lower one is a one-year offense that the government can prove without showing you knew anything. The higher one is a three-year offense that needs intent to defraud or mislead. We did not take the affidavit’s word for that; we read the statute, and the text matches. Title 21, section 333(a)(1) says that a person who breaks one of the prohibitions shall be imprisoned for not more than one year or fined not more than $1,000, or both. Section 333(a)(2) raises that, for a repeat or for intent to defraud or mislead, to shall be imprisoned for not more than three years or fined not more than $10,000, or both.

The distributor was charged on the lower setting: one count under sections 331(a) and 333(a)(1), labeled in the caption (introduction of a misbranded drug). The charge says he did introduce and deliver for introduction into interstate commerce drugs that were misbranded within the meaning of Title 21, United States Code, Section 352(a) in that their labeling was false and misleading in any particular. Not that he made them. Not that he wrote the label. That he moved them.

Our page on what turns a misbranding charge into a felony covers the upper setting in detail. This case is the clean example of the lower one, and the lower one is the setting that reaches a reseller who did nothing but buy and ship.

The escape the statute actually writes, and what it requires

Here is the part almost nobody mentions. The same section of the law that creates the offense also writes the exits from it, in a subsection headed (c) Exceptions in certain cases of good faith, etc. It opens No person shall be subject to the penalties of subsection (a)(1) of this section — the one-year setting, the one used here — and then lists the circumstances.

The one that fits a distributor charged with introducing misbranded goods is the second, and this is its wording:

if he establishes a guaranty or undertaking signed by, and containing the name and address of, the person residing in the United States from whom he received in good faith the article … to the effect that such article is not adulterated or misbranded, within the meaning of this chapter.

Count what that asks for. A guaranty or undertaking. Signed. Carrying the name and address of the supplier. From a supplier resident in the United States. Saying the specific thing — that the article is not adulterated or misbranded. That is a document, obtained before the goods move, from a party who can be found afterwards. It is not a sentence in an email, and it is not a conversation.

We counted the word in all four documents. It appears zero times. guaranty returns 0 in the affidavit, 0 in the criminal complaint, 0 in the Information and 0 in the plea agreement. The same four documents return 103 hits for Defendant, 29 for forfeiture and 21 for misbranded, so this is a search that works, run against text that is there.

Be careful what that zero means, because it is easy to over-read. It does not establish that the exception was unavailable to him, that he had no paperwork, or that raising it would have changed anything. It establishes only that the word is absent from the pleadings and from the agreement he signed. What a distributor had or did not have in a filing cabinet is not something this page can see.

The neighboring exception, the first one, is the one in our page about receiving a mislabeled drug, and the difference between the two is worth holding on to. That one protects a good-faith delivery unless he refuses to furnish on request of an officer or employee duly designated by the Secretary the name and address of the person from whom he purchased or received such article and copies of all documents, if any there be, pertaining to the delivery of the article to him. Being able to say who you bought from, after the fact, when asked. The second exception asks for more than that: a signed undertaking, obtained in advance, that says the goods are clean.

The money, and why it is not a fine

The plea agreement prints the maximum penalties for the single count it covers: Count One: 1 year imprisonment; a fine of $100,000; a term of supervised release of 1 year; a mandatory special assessment of $100;

Then, separately, it carries this:

Defendant agrees to the entry of a forfeiture money judgment in the amount of $340,200.

$340,200 is 3.402 times the $100,000 maximum fine, and the same document prints the two figures three pages apart — the forfeiture on page 3 of 9, the maximum penalties on page 6. Against the figure printed in the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act itself for this offense — $1,000 — the forfeiture is 340.2 times larger. The two are not the same instrument: the fine appears in the paragraph listing maximum penalties, while the forfeiture has its own paragraph, its own statutory hook at section 334, and its own payment deadline.

The agreement makes that distinction expensive in four specific ways, and each is a clause a reader can check:

• He agreed to identify all assets over which Defendant exercises or exercised control, directly or indirectly, within the past five years, and to consent to the release of Defendant's tax returns for the previous five years.
• He agreed to pay the judgment in the form of a certified or cashier's check payable to the U.S. Marshals Service, by at least 30 days prior to sentencing in this matter — that is, before anybody is sentenced, not after.
• He agreed to waive every challenge to the forfeiture, including that the forfeiture constitutes an excessive fine or punishment.
• And on the part that would normally reduce exposure, there is nothing: There is no agreement as to which Offense Level and Criminal History Category applies in this case.

What the documents do not say is how $340,200 was arrived at. We listed every dollar figure in all four files to check that, and only five distinct amounts appear anywhere: the $340,200 itself, the $100,000 and $10,000 penalty caps, the $100 special assessment, and the $1000 threshold above which he had to disclose assets. There is no sales total, no revenue figure and no calculation anywhere in them — the affidavit, which is the document with all the counting in it, contains no dollar figure at all. The agreement’s surrounding language calls the money proceeds of the offense, and the Information names the same number as a ceiling for substitute assets — $340,200.00 — but neither document derives it. Anybody who tells you this figure is a standard multiple of anything is guessing, and so would we be.

The printed fine caps run backwards

This is the detail that stopped us, because it looks like a mistake until you check it twice. The supplier — the man the government says imported the pills, repackaged them and labeled them — was charged on four felony counts, each under section 333(a)(2), the intent limb:

The complaint’s own penalty attachment prints Fine: $10,000 beside each of the four felony counts. The plea agreement prints $100,000 beside the one misdemeanor count. Per count, that is ten times more fine exposure printed for the lesser offense — and even adding all four felony counts together, $40,000 against $100,000. Same investigation, same U.S. Attorney’s office, two documents filed nine days apart.

The two numbers come from two different places, and we looked the second one up instead of assuming it. The $10,000 and the $1,000 are the figures printed in the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act itself, which we read. The general federal fine statute, Title 18 section 3571, says an individual may be fined not more than the greatest of a list of amounts, one of which is the amount specified in the law setting forth the offense and another of which is for a Class A misdemeanor that does not result in death, not more than $100,000. The $100,000 in the plea agreement is that figure, to the dollar. This page does not resolve which number governs a given count, and it is not the place to find that out — the observation here is narrower and it is the useful one: the fine number printed on a charging document in this area is not a reliable guide to what the case costs. Here the fine cap was beside the point: the money in the agreement is a forfeiture, and it is 3.402 times the cap.

Four sellers charged on the same provisions, four different endings

One case is an anecdote. Before treating $340,200 as what this costs, we searched the Justice Department’s own press archive for releases with misbranded in the title — it reports 241 of them — and read the ones nearest this case’s shape. Three more are below. They are not the whole set and they are not a sample of it. The spread is the point of the table; no single row is.

Three things in that table are worth saying out loud.

The money figures are not the same kind of number. One is an agreed forfeiture judgment with no stated derivation. One is a fine. One is an estimate of a business’s gross proceeds, which nobody was ordered to pay. One is a forfeiture the release expressly ties to net profit — the same release says the business sold over $2.2 million in products and that the defendant made $180,000 in net profit, and it is the smaller figure that was forfeited. Lining these up in a column does not make them comparable, and we have not averaged them.

The man who actually made the product got the felony. Goldsmith pleaded guilty to a felony information Thursday charging one count of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce, having, per the release, imported the ingredient and filled the capsules himself. The reseller in our main case got the misdemeanor. But do not read a rule into that. The statute’s dividing line is intent to defraud or mislead, not whether you manufactured anything — so this is a pattern across four records, and four records are not a rule. A reseller can be charged on the felony limb, and nothing here says otherwise.

And one row belongs to a product class much closer to this index’s subject than sildenafil pouches. In the SARMs case, the government’s own narrative names the research-use style disclaimer as the false labeling, not as a shield: the defendant knew that the products contained false and misleading labeling, such as “not for human consumption.” The same paragraph records that Garman and an associate provided advice to customers on SARMs and SERMs dosing, including in conjunction with performance enhancing drugs. Two separate pages here cover that pattern in full: why a research-use-only line is not a defense and the SARMs regulatory record. It is also the reason no page in this index tells anybody how much of anything to use, or how — not in a table, not in a calculator, not in an aside. Advice of that kind appears in the government’s narrative as a fact against the seller, never as a mitigation.

What this has to do with a research-compound buyer

Strip the case down to its structure and it is not about erectile-dysfunction pouches at all. A company bought finished goods from one supplier for about seven years, resold them under the brand printed on the package, and, on its owner’s own account to an agent, relied on having been told the goods were tested. No testing of its own appears anywhere in the four documents — which is not the same as saying there was none, only that the record does not show any. That is a very ordinary way to run a distribution business, and in this case it produced a federal criminal charge that needed no proof of knowledge, a signed agreement to plead guilty to it, and an agreed money judgment larger than the maximum fine. We say charge and agreement and not conviction on purpose: no sentence has been located, so this page does not know how the case ended.

The thing most often offered in place of your own testing is a certificate from the supplier. Two pages here go through exactly what such a certificate does and does not establish — whose test is on the certificate and what a certificate of analysis does not test for — and the short version is that it reports on a sample somebody else drew, at their own site, before the goods shipped. On the record above, the thing the statute credits is not a test result at all. It is a signed undertaking, with a name and an address on it, from a supplier inside the United States. Those are different documents and they answer different questions.

Two further pages here cover the regulatory side of the same position: what FDA asks a distributor to do and who is responsible when the product is private label. And if you are wondering what the ending looks like when the government goes after a company without charging anybody with a crime, that is the consent decree.

What does the evidence not show?

This section is the point of the page, not an afterthought. Everything above is drawn from four court documents, two statutes and four press releases, and the gaps in them are large.

• Nobody’s state of mind is established. The statement that the distributor was unaware, and had been told the product was lab tested, is a sworn record of what he said. It is not a finding by a court and it is not endorsed here.
• Two facts in the same paragraph cut against reading it as a clean good-faith case, and they go in the body of the page, not in a footnote. The affidavit records that Ahmed paid BEHL for the JMY in both cash and check, but predominately ninety (90) percent of purchases were in cash. And it records that When paying by check, Ahmed stated that BEHL requested Ahmed issue the checks in the name of Busy Bubbles. — where Busy Bubbles was the name of a laundromat that was operated by BEHL and was no longer in business. Neither fact is charged. Neither is characterized by the government. No inference is drawn from either here. They are on the page because a reader who finds them somewhere else later should have found them here first.
• The zero on guaranty is a measurement of four documents, not of the world. It does not show the exception was unavailable, that it was considered and rejected, or that it would have worked. It shows the word is not in those files.
• No sentence has been located in the distributor’s case, and no record showing the $340,200 was paid. The agreement requires payment 30 days before sentencing; whether that happened is not something this page knows. The docket number for anyone who wants to check is 1:25-cr-00091-JJM-AEM (D.R.I.).
• The supplier was charged, not convicted. The Justice Department release carries its own caveat, and we repeat it word for word instead of paraphrasing it: A federal criminal complaint is merely an accusation. A defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. Everything on this page about the supplier is an allegation.
• None of these cases involves a peptide, and none involves a research-chemical website. And they are not even four of the same thing: two concern a prescription drug hidden inside a product sold as a natural supplement, one concerns selling prescription drugs without a license, and one concerns SARMs and SERMs sold online. What transfers is a statute and a structure, not a set of facts. A different product and a different record could come out differently.
• The charging document gives two different date ranges for the same sales, and we did not resolve which one is operative. The narrative paragraph says the sales ran From at least January 2019 through July 2023 — 54 months. The charged count says From in or about July 2018 through September 2023 — 62 months, starting six months earlier and ending two months later. Both sentences are in the same six-page Information. We report both and have not guessed which is operative.
• The press release gets the filing date wrong, and the error is instructive. The release says the distributor has been charged by way of an information filed on July 23, 2025. The document attached to that same release carries an electronic court stamp reading Case 1:25-cr-00091-JJM-AEM Document 1 Filed 07/28/25 on every page — five days later. The plea agreement’s signature page carries two legible dates, both 7/25/2025, which falls between the two; a third date on that page is unreadable in the document’s text layer and we have not tried to attribute the legible two to particular signatories. Where a release and the document it links disagree, this page uses the document.
• This is not legal advice and it is not a compliance checklist. Nothing here tells anyone what paperwork to obtain or what would protect them. It reports what four public records say and what two statutes say. Anybody making a decision about their own supply chain needs a lawyer, not an index page.

Sources

• United States v. Mahr Ahmed, 1:25-cr-00091-JJM-AEM (D.R.I.) — Information, 6 pages, filed July 28, 2025. Fetched October 9, 2026 from justice.gov/usao-ri/media/1410221, HTTP 200, 190,951 bytes, native text layer (9,549 characters over 6 pages).
• United States v. Mahr Ahmed, same docket — Plea agreement, 9 pages, filed July 28, 2025, signed by counsel July 25, 2025. Fetched October 9, 2026 from justice.gov/usao-ri/media/1410226, HTTP 200, 511,115 bytes, native text layer (15,405 characters over 9 pages).
• United States v. Jitender Behl, 1:25-mj-47-PAS (D.R.I.) — Affidavit of Special Agent Jason Giannelli, FDA Office of Criminal Investigations, 9 pages, sworn August 6, 2025. Fetched October 9, 2026 from justice.gov/usao-ri/media/1410206, HTTP 200, 253,099 bytes, native text layer (18,987 characters over 9 pages). The affiant states I have been employed as a Special Agent with FDA/OCI since August 2007.
• United States v. Jitender Behl, same docket — Criminal complaint (form AO 91) with its penalty attachment, 2 pages, August 6, 2025. Fetched October 9, 2026 from justice.gov/usao-ri/media/1410211, HTTP 200, 438,581 bytes, native text layer.
• How those four addresses were obtained, because it changes how the links should be read. Justice Department pages return an automated-traffic challenge to a script rather than the page, so the four document addresses were taken from the body field of the Department’s own press-release data interface, which returns the release as raw HTML with its links intact. Each address above is byte-identical to an href in the body of the release below, and each returned a PDF of the size stated. A plain HTTP 200 from justice.gov is not evidence that a document exists — the challenge page returns 200 as well — so provenance, not status code, is what stands behind these four.
• Two Charged in Investigation into Importation and Distribution of Misbranded Drugs, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Rhode Island, August 6, 2025. Body read October 9, 2026 through the Department’s press-release data interface; it carries all four documents above as attachments.
• Dauphin County Man Ordered To Forfeit $180,000 For Distributing Misbranded Drugs And Money Laundering, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Pennsylvania, September 30, 2026. Body read October 9, 2026.
• Lehigh County Man Sentenced for Obtaining, Distributing Misbranded Drugs to Allentown-Area Convenience Stores, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, dated October 14, 2025. Body read October 9, 2026. The release notes that its own posting was delayed by a federal government shutdown, so its publication date and the date it describes are not the same day.
• Glen Carbon Business Owner Admits to Selling Misbranded Male Enhancement Supplements, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Illinois, August 25, 2023. Body read October 9, 2026.
• The four releases above were found by querying the Department’s press-release interface for the title term misbranded, which reports 241 matching releases and returns them 50 at a time. The four quoted here were selected from the first page by product class and by the seller’s role — they are not the whole set, and no claim is made that they are representative of it. The full response is archived.
• 21 U.S.C. § 333, Penalties, United States Code, 2024 Edition, U.S. Government Publishing Office. Fetched October 9, 2026, HTTP 200, 66,350 bytes. Subsections (a)(1), (a)(2) and (c) were read from these bytes, so nothing on this page about the statute rests on a court filing’s summary of it.
• 18 U.S.C. § 3571, Sentence of fine, same edition and source. Fetched October 9, 2026, HTTP 200. Read only to establish where the $100,000 figure in the plea agreement matches a printed amount; no conclusion is drawn about which provision governs.
• Every quotation on this page was matched against the archived bytes of the document named beside it before it was published, with whitespace normalised on both sides because the court PDFs break sentences across lines. Every number was traced to the source that carries it, and the arithmetic — 3.402, the 54-month and 62-month windows, the five-day and three-day date gaps — was computed from the two figures named next to it, not carried over from any summary.

COMPLIANCE: This page reports the contents of public U.S. federal court records, two federal statutes, and four U.S. Department of Justice press releases. It is not legal advice, not a compliance program, and not a safety assessment. It makes no claim about any product sold by Artemis Labs or by any other vendor, and it does not state or imply that any compound is safe, effective, or appropriate for any use. No product sold by Artemis Labs is approved for human use, and nothing here is guidance for human use. Of the people named above, one was charged and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty; the others are described according to the public record of their own pleas or sentences, and in one case no sentence has been located at all.

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.