Fake COAs Are Real: How Peptide Vendors Forge Lab Reports

Let me tell you about the moment I stopped trusting PDFs.

A while back, someone sent me two lab reports from two different vendors. Different company names, different logos, different product photos. But when I laid the HPLC charts side by side, they were the same chart. Same peaks, same wobble in the baseline, same retention time to the decimal. One of them, maybe both, was a fake peptide COA.

That's the problem in one sentence. A certificate of analysis is only worth something if it's real, and forging one takes about twenty minutes and a copy of Photoshop.

Standard disclaimer: these are research compounds, not FDA-approved drugs, and they're sold for laboratory research only.

How a fake peptide COA gets made

Vendors who fake reports aren't usually master criminals. They use a handful of lazy tricks.

The recycled report. The vendor tests one good batch, once, and then reuses that report for every batch after it. The compound might still be fine. Or it might not. You have no way to know, because the paper doesn't match the powder.

The borrowed report. They grab a real COA from another vendor or a raw material supplier, swap the logo, and call it theirs. This is where the identical-chart problem I described comes from.

The number edit. A real report says 96.8%. A quick edit makes it 99.4%. Everything else on the page stays legitimate, which makes this one hard to catch.

The ghost lab. The report names a laboratory that doesn't exist, or one with no website, no address, and no phone number. Nobody checks.

The template. Some sellers skip the lab entirely and fill in a blank template. These often look the cleanest, which is exactly the problem.

Warning signs to look for

You don't need lab training to spot most fakes. You need to slow down and look.

• Missing lot number. A real COA is tied to a specific batch. If there's no lot number, or the lot number on the report doesn't match the vial, the report proves nothing.
• No lab name, or a lab you can't find. Search the lab. If it doesn't exist outside of that one PDF, assume the worst.
• Dates that don't line up. A test date after the product was listed for sale. A test date years old on a "new batch." A report dated on a Sunday from a lab that's closed on weekends.
• Identical results across batches. Real testing gives slightly different numbers every run. If a vendor's tirzepatide has read exactly 99.31% for six lots in a row, that's not consistency. That's copy and paste.
• Image editing tells. Zoom in on the numbers. Look for fonts that don't match the rest of the page, text that sits slightly off the line, blurry patches, or a purity figure that's sharper than everything around it.
• Purity with no identity. A forged report often shows a big HPLC percentage but skips the mass spec section. Mass spectrometry confirms the compound is actually what it claims to be, and it's harder to fake convincingly.

What to do when a COA looks off

Ask the vendor for the batch-specific report for the lot you'd receive. Watch how they respond. A legitimate seller has it ready. A sketchy one stalls, sends a generic file, or gets defensive.

If you're serious about your research, you can also send a sample to an independent lab yourself. It costs money, but it settles the question.

And if you're spending real money, walk away from any vendor who makes you ask for the paperwork in the first place.

The vendors that don't make you play detective

Here's the thing. None of this detective work is necessary when a vendor does testing the right way. Exactide sends every batch to a third-party lab, checks identity, purity, and sterility, verifies purity at 99% or higher, and publishes the batch-specific COA before the product ships. The report is there before you buy, matched to the lot you'd receive.

That's not a favor. That's the minimum. Vendors who hide their lab work, delay it, or recycle it are telling you something, and you should believe them.

If you want to see what an honest COA process looks like, take a look at Exactide and compare it to whatever you've been sent before.