Peptide Cults and Cartel Bosses: Down the Group Buy Rabbit Hole

A multi-part series about the peptide world's unregulated gray market

This is the second installment of a four-part series. Read the first installment here:

Inside the Strange World of Peptide Group Buys

Part 2: Down the Rabbit Hole

Em joined a GB Discord server called WellnessBuy¹. “Even though I was new, I could tell the server owner/GB organizer was a bit shady,” they said.

And they weren’t wrong. From the get-go, “Sandy”² appeared more than willing to play fast and loose with her customers and their peptides. First, she claimed to have a trusted relationship with a reputable Chinese vendor, but would not disclose the name of that vendor. Then, she informed the GB members that there had been a raid on the factory in China where the peptides were being manufactured – not an uncommon occurrence, given that Chinese chemical manufacturers have come under fire by the FDA before for synthesizing compounds of unknown/untested purity and selling them via gray market methods to buyers with questionable intent.

In fact, one notorious example of this phenomenon is the manufacture and sale of chemical precursors like protonitazene to the powerful drug fentanyl: in October of 2024, the DEA found that eight China-based chemical manufacturers had been manufacturing and selling the substance via gray market methods, and using pseudonymous cryptocurrency transfers like Bitcoin. Drug cartels in the United States and Mexico were among the buyers; they subsequently synthesized the highly addictive opioid and distributed it to individual users in the U.S., feeding the country’s ongoing crisis of fentanyl overdoses.

When Sandy reported the raid, the members of the GB server didn’t find it particularly unusual. It was what happened next that threw them for a loop: she informed them that they wouldn’t be refunded for the peptides they’d purchased in bulk through her.

“Most trustworthy or reputable vendors will often state in their vendor statements” – disclaimers at the top of GB order forms – “that they would offer refunds or remake [the batch of peptides] if anything happened,” Em said. Sandy was no exception.

But it didn’t matter either way, because Sandy had no intention of redistributing the GB members’ funds. Em and a few other members of the WellnessBuy server did some sleuthing, and what they found was damning. Sandy hadn’t been lying about the factory raid, but she had been lying about the refund: the Chinese manufacturer had refunded her the full amount in Bitcoin she and the GB members had collectively paid for the peptide shipment, but Sandy had endeavored to conceal that fact via a poorly doctored “message exchange” in which the vendor appeared to be denying her the refund they’d already sent her.

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It was clear she was lying, but it didn’t stop her from shutting down the WellnessBuy server and absconding with over 28,000 BTC. Disturbing but predictable behavior, especially from a scammer. Em was less surprised by Sandy’s role in the debacle than by the strange behavior she witnessed from WellnessBuy members next.

“Even with evidence showing she was lying, people were still defending her and grouping together to bully the ones asking questions and showing that she was lying.” Using only a Discord server and the promise of high-quality Chinese peptides, Sandy had managed to construct such a powerful cult of personality that other server members were willing to launder her reputation for her – and viciously so. The result: even after she fled Discord with tens of thousands in Bitcoin, Sandy was able to re-establish her GB on Facebook with a coterie of her loyal followers. The story doesn’t end there, however. Sandy was vengeful, and would settle for nothing less than a public pillorying of those who’d “wronged” her. It was, Em told me, a harrowing experience for everyone involved.

Retaliatory behaviors like doxxing or sending threatening emails are common for scammers in the gray market peptide world. Before shutting down – or “nuking,” in gray market parlance – one’s Discord server, aggrieved scammers will freely post the names, emails, and personal addresses of those they blame for their exposure. This is dangerous – especially in a digital environment where paranoia is already running high. Add some threatening personal emails to the mix, and you have a full battery of intimidation tactics that cynical organizers can weaponize against GB members from afar.

Nowadays, Em makes their peptide purchases through Telegram, only dipping into Discord for an occasional GB if the organizer happened to be making a purchase from one of Em’s favorite vendors. While Em recognizes that the bulk discount price of the typical GB is one of the lowest – if not the lowest – prices for peptides around, the risks of dealing with potential scammers outweigh the financial benefits of the GB.

“Essentially it’s a blind following, a blind faith [people place] in these resellers,” they said. “They’re very friendly, and do a good job to create a space for people in these servers where it’s a very community-oriented, ‘we’re all in this together’-kind of vibe.”

Em suspects that part of the reason charismatic GB organizers have such an easy time building their cults of personality is that they’re working with a population especially vulnerable to such grooming: “It’s playing on people’s insecurities, self-esteem issues, and lack of friendship or community due to obesity/sickness that comes with being on the outskirts of society.”

“Essentially, it’s a blind following. A blind faith these people place in these resellers.”

Here, Em has landed on a truth that reveals not just why peptide group buys continue proliferating despite the prevalence of scammers, but something arguably more sinister: under-resourced people seeking peptides for myriad health issues but shut out of clinical or research treatment will still find ways to pay for and consume peptides – except these peptides will be synthesized without FDA guidance and oversight. This means that Chinese vendors and GB organizers could be colluding to send impure product rife with endotoxins or heavy metals to unsuspecting buyers. They could be mixing batches of peptides, falsifying test results, or sending illegal controlled substances in place of what they claimed to be sending.

In fact, all of these things have happened. Uncapped: Stories from the Grey Market is an anonymous podcast – it’s credited to a creator named “krysia” with no other credits – that claims to “dive deep into the underground world of grey market peptides, research compounds, and the Discord and Telegram communities that operate just outside the lines.” Uncapped is a bizarre and hyper-specific drama in many acts, told with a roundtable of AI-robo voices. Strange though it is, I ended up bingeing the entire thing. I found its granularity impressive, and couldn’t help noticing how thoroughly it corroborated much of what Em had described to me about the GB world.

One season of Uncapped is dedicated entirely to a debacle endured by members of a European Union GB seeking North American prices, but ultimately defrauded by a vendor who’d sold them an impure and dubiously compounded product. “The Tinky Winky Quadrilogy” is the oddly captivating story of a shameless scammer who shows up on a Peppys-like server touting hundreds of milligrams-worth of peptides at fire sale prices – later on, he’s exposed as a Chinese hacker who’d stolen a major peptide player’s Instagram avatar, disappearing from the server only to resurface shortly thereafter using the appropriated persona of a health-obsessed peptide saleswoman. Yet another season tells the harrowing story of a disgruntled vendor who sends “hot packs” of illegal steroids to GB members who dare to speak out about his shady business practices.

Paranoia, profit, revenge, and “nuking” (i.e. the sudden disappearance of a server, whether because of detection by the platform itself or a tip-off from a competitor): there’s a kind of cloak-and-dagger drama to it all, poison-tongued infighting one would sooner expect to encounter on Blackbeard’s ship or at El Chapo’s ranch than on a server frequented by a bunch of millennials who know the chemical makeup of a carboxyl chain.

But the unregulated peptide grey market is a strange world, bringing together individuals from across the globe eager to close the supply-side gap for these powerful amino acid chains that more and more consumers want affordable access to. While the research value of peptides is undeniable, a compound has to be more than just scientifically compelling to capture the popular imagination the way peptides have.

For unregulated experimentation with a pharmaceutical to take off, that substance has to arrive into the popular consciousness in the right way, at the right time, and with the right set of evangelists.

Next week, we’ll learn more about how wellness influencers, U.S. government officials, and Silicon Valley’s culture of self-optimization have contributed to the “peptide craze.”

1. Pseudonym.

2. Pseudonym.