Fake COA red flags

1. The certificate does not name your batch

What you see: No lot number, a lot number that differs from the one on your vial, or no test date. A certificate has to belong to a specific batch. Without a lot number you cannot tell whether it describes the vial you have, and generic certificates can be reused across batches. Peptides degrade. Without a date you cannot tell whether the result is recent or years old, or whether it predates the batch.¹²

What published tests show: A certificate that is not tied to the vial cannot speak for what is in it, and published tests show how far a vial can be from its name. A box and vials labelled long R3 IGF-1, intercepted by the Belgian medicines agency, held epidermal growth factor, a cell-culture reagent, and no IGF-1 of any form.¹ Pens presented as Ozempic, analysed by a German state laboratory, held insulin glulisine and no semaglutide; people in Austria who injected them were admitted to hospital.² Of 17 products sold as follistatin 344 and bought by a doping-control laboratory, 8 held no protein of follistatin's size at all,³ and none of 14 products sold as ACE-031 held ACE-031.⁴

2. A purity figure stands in for the amount

What you see: The certificate gives HPLC purity, often 98% or 99%, and nothing about how many milligrams of peptide the vial holds.

What published tests show: HPLC purity is a share of the ultraviolet signal, not of the powder's weight, so a vial can show a clean chromatogram and still hold a fraction of its label. A seized vial labelled 10 mg of melanotan II held 8.7 mg of powder, of which 30% was melanotan II: 2.61 mg, with no impurity peaks to warn of it.⁷ Three semaglutide products bought online were advertised at 99% purity; semaglutide made up 7.7% to 14.4% of the powder in their vials, and each held 28.6% to 38.7% more semaglutide than its label said.⁶ Three products sold as 10 mg of retatrutide held 5.13 mg, 16.5 mg and 19.0 mg, though all three were the right molecule,⁸ and three melanotan II vials sold as 10 mg held 4.32 to 8.84 mg.⁹ Look for a measured content in mg per vial, with its method; a percentage alone does not give it.

3. Identity rests on a name, not a measurement

What you see: No mass-spectrometry result, a measured mass that does not match the peptide, or a structure on the label that is not the peptide's. Purity says how clean the sample is, not what it is. Without a measured mass there is no identity check, and a pure sample of the wrong peptide would pass.¹²

What published tests show: In the ACE-031 products, a protein of roughly the right size was present, but mass spectrometry showed it was the full-length receptor without the antibody fragment that ACE-031 carries, and 11 of the 12 also carried a His-tag, a purification tag used in laboratory protein production.⁴ A tablet supplement labelled as GHRP-2 printed a chemical structure on its label that does not belong to GHRP-2.⁵ Paste the certificate into the COA decoder: it checks the reported mass against the peptide's expected mass.

4. The numbers are too clean

What you see: Purity reported as exactly 100% or 100.00%, or a purity figure with no chromatogram behind it. No chromatographic method measures a peptide as exactly 100% pure: there are always small impurity peaks and a measurement uncertainty. A certificate that reports 100% or 100.00% is rounding, templated or not a real measurement. A purity figure without the chromatogram behind it cannot be checked: you cannot see the impurity peaks or how the percentage was integrated.¹²

What published tests show: A real chromatogram has small peaks besides the main one and a measurement with an uncertainty. A figure that cannot be checked against its chromatogram is a number, not a result.

5. Nothing about what an injection needs

What you see: No endotoxin result, no sterility test and no test for metals: the certificate covers purity and mass only. Endotoxins are fragments of bacteria that cause fever and inflammation when injected. Purity and mass tests do not detect them; an endotoxin (LAL) result in EU/mg does.¹²

What published tests show: A Belgian control laboratory ran sterility tests on 100 illegal injectable peptide samples, 60 of them bought from three internet sites selling peptides as research chemicals: two vials from the same site grew haemolytic Bacillus cereus, carrying genes for its main enterotoxins.¹⁰ A Belgian screening of the ten falsified peptide drugs most often met on that market, bought from three suspected illegal internet pharmacies, found purities of 5% to 75% for cysteine-containing peptides, arsenic in several samples at up to ten times the ICH limit for injectable drugs, and lead in one.¹¹ A purity and mass certificate would have shown none of this.

6. The label or pack has errors

What you see: Spelling mistakes on the label, a pack that looks different from the genuine product, or a printed structure that does not match the name.

What published tests show: The long R3 IGF-1 vials that held epidermal growth factor misspelled their own ingredient as 'reconbinant'.¹ The falsified Ozempic pens looked clearly different from the genuine pens and resembled a relabelled insulin pen.² Errors on a pack are not proof of forgery, but they are a reason to distrust a certificate that came with it.

What to do with a certificate

• Match the lot number and date on the certificate to the vial, and ask the laboratory named on it whether it issued that report number.
• Read it with the COA decoder, which explains each result and flags what is missing.
• Look for a measured content in mg per vial, a mass-spectrometry identity result, and endotoxin and sterility results, not a purity figure alone.
• See what independent laboratories found for your compound in the published test results, failures included.

Sources

1. Vanhee C, Janvier S, Moens G, Goscinny S, Courselle P, Deconinck E. Identification of epidermal growth factor (EGF), in an unknown pharmaceutical preparation suspected to contain insulin like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). Drug Test Anal 2017;9(5):831-7. PubMed 27390261
2. CVUA Karlsruhe (a German state medicines-control laboratory). Ozempic, the diabetes injection that is also used as a 'slimming product': suspected falsification now also confirmed analytically. November 22, 2023; English version published by the EDQM. Report (EDQM)
3. Reichel C, Gmeiner G, Thevis M. Detection of black market follistatin 344. Drug Test Anal 2019;11(11-12):1675-97. PubMed 31758732
4. Reichel C et al. Gel Electrophoretic Detection of Black Market ACE-031. Drug Test Anal 2025;17(10). PubMed 40312924
5. Kohler M, Thomas A, Geyer H, Petrou M, Schänzer W, Thevis M. Confiscated black market products and nutritional supplements with non-approved ingredients analyzed in the Cologne Doping Control Laboratory 2009. Drug Test Anal 2010;2(11-12):533-7. PubMed 21204286
6. Ashraf AR, Mackey TK, Vida RG, et al. Multifactor Quality and Safety Analysis of Semaglutide Products Sold by Online Sellers Without a Prescription: Market Surveillance, Content Analysis, and Product Purchase Evaluation Study. J Med Internet Res 2024;26:e65440. PubMed 39509151
7. Deville M, Charlier C. Barbie drug identification: Not a child's play. J Forensic Sci 2024;69(6):2331-8. PubMed 39302005
8. Piatkowski T, Craven A, Cornell S, Ferris J. Composition and Labelling Accuracy of Products Sold as Retatrutide in Australia. Drug Alcohol Rev 2026;45(6):e70231. PubMed 42559975
9. Breindahl T, Evans-Brown M, Hindersson P, et al. Identification and characterization by LC-UV-MS/MS of melanotan II skin-tanning products sold illegally on the Internet. Drug Test Anal 2015;7(2):164-72. PubMed 24771717
10. Janvier S, Wattijn E, Botteldoorn N, De Spiegeleer B, Deconinck E, Vanhee C. Are injectable illegal polypeptide drugs safe? Case report demonstrating the presence of haemolytic Bacillus cereus in 2 illegal peptide drugs. Drug Test Anal 2018;10(4):791-5. PubMed 28941153
11. Janvier S, Cheyns K, Canfyn M, Goscinny S, De Spiegeleer B, Vanhee C, Deconinck E. Impurity profiling of the most frequently encountered falsified polypeptide drugs on the Belgian market. Talanta 2018;188:795-807. PubMed 30029448
12. Grey Peptides COA decoder rules, assets/coa-rules.json. coa-rules.json

Updated 3 November 2026. Rules: methodology.