Steroids scam has probably costed the community more than all the protein combined (and we can throw some Creatine on top). Here’s what you can do to never get fooled.
A Few Notes to Start With
This guide is about buying steroids online. Offline, you’re on your own and your best defense is your intuition.
This guide does not claim that any source that falls to one or more signs is a 100% fake scam operation. It’s never that simple. We can be crossed out under some lines as well, though we have served our clients in Canada with literal zero complaints for over 2 years now.
And finally: this guide works only if you actually use it, aka do the stuff we list. Your intuition does NOT work online. Actually do it when in doubt.
How Many Steroids Online are Fake?
It’s important to distinguish fake gear from fake sources right ahead.
According to this study on the anabolic steroids market from 2022, about 36% of all gear on the black market (and there’s no «white» market for Trenbolone if you’re not a damn horse) is fake. Can you distinguish real Testosterone from bunk Testosterone by looking at it? Most likely, hell no.
What you CAN do, however, is distinguishing a store that’s more likely to sell you fake shit or just take your money and disappear.
This is exactly what this guide is for: teaching you to detect fake plugs, to avoid dealing with shady sources in the first place and maximize your chances of getting the gear you ordered, as ordered, with the label reflecting clearly what’s inside the vial.
Are There Really Fake Steroid Sources?
In case you were born yesterday and someone reads this guide to you instead of a bedtime story, yes, there are scammers in the world of anabolic steroids, and there’s a lot of them.
Why? We’re in the damn back alley of the Internet. The Grey Zone. It’s not like anyone can call the police and say «Hey guys, so I wanted to buy this shit that’s illegal to buy and I got scammed, can you do something?». They can, but you won’t like it. It costs a lot to get caught with gear in Canada.
The Rule of Thumb
Most of the time, scammers avoid the consequences. For them, it’s a simple quest of finding a fool.
We encourage you not to be a fool. Scam sources exist because people still send them money. People send them money for two reasons:
- Too lazy to do due diligence;
- Don’t know how to do it.
If you’re from the first group and you test your luck, please, donate your supposed order’s price to the Red Cross. They’ll find a better use for the money you’re willing to lose, at least better than some scammer from Bangalore.
And if you’re from the second group — sit back and read on.
Types of Scammers Out There
To make it easier, let’s break it into parts. We’ve managed to come up with 5 distinctive scammer types:
- Lazy & brazen;
- Parasites;
- Social engineering bros;
- Smart-asses;
- Full-on fake stores.
Sometimes they mix and it’s hard to find a «purebred». Sometimes they break the boundaries of the imaginable with their stupidity. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Lazy & Brazen
- Where do they live: Telegram, Facebook
- Weapon of choice: sheer power of luck
- Target audience: elderly people or complete newbies
- How to fight: just ignore
You’ve seen this guys in your DMs a thousand times if you participate in any bodybuilding or steroid community online: They appear in your DMs inbox out of nowhere and act like a stereotypical drugs dealer from a social commercial from the 1990s: «Hey kid, want to buy some gear? I have what you need!»
Their modus operandi is simple: brute force and monotonous repetition. Work hard, not smart.
Out of a hundred messages sent, they’ll get an answer to a dozen, and one guy will be stupid enough to buy something from them. Sounds like a waste of time? Well, they send tens of thousands of messages like these in a month.
The stupidest and silliest, the absolute bottom of a food chain, do it manually. A little smarter, though still lazy, do it with spam automation software.
How to avoid being scammed by a lazy & brazen scammer?
Remember this:
No legit anabolic steroid shop uses direct messages. not a single one.
There are many reasons as to why:
- It’s a no-no, reserved for scammers, a reputation and dignity thing;
- It’s less cost-effective than making a nice website or reaching out to some actual platforms that will check your authenticity;
- Finally, nobody has time for it. The number of deals we can «close» that way is too low to pay for the time it takes. It’s a legitimate way to go only if you have no other way to promote your products, but most actual stores have better means.
So if you get a message on Telegram or to your Facebook Messenger, an unwelcome one, promising you pretty much whatever — keep in mind that it’s 99% a scammer on the raid for your cash.
Parasites
- Where do they live: social media
- Weapon of choice: identity theft
- Target audience: lazy and naive
- How to fight: double check
Oh, the parasites. people that have nothing and mimic other brands.
Here’s a simple example: go to Telegram and type in Roids101. Then Roids_101. And then Roid101. Or any other combination.
As of June 2023, there are 12 fake Roids101 stores on Telegram alone, and just one legit: https://t.me/roids101
All these guys, some probably inactive already, have nothing to do with our store:
These are scammers. Yet, they copy the easiest aspects they can:
- Our profile pic;
- Our bio;
- The posts;
- Our nickname (and variations of it);
- Our branded visuals and materials.
Some of those guys have more followers than we do, although those are probably bots (at least this is our SMM guy’s excuse).
To our knowledge, every decent store has at least a couple of parasites. And the monsters of the industry have dozens, if not hundreds. The number of fake Napsgear stores is impossible to count, they just come and go. And Remember James from The James Case? You get the point.
How to avoid being scammed by a parasite source?
Reverse their whole nature and use it against them:
Find the original
Most of the time, an established brand will have a website. An actual website is more expensive to build and maintain, and much harder to copy. So while there are over a dozen Roids101 clones on Telegram, there are no copies of our website. Almost all brands care about their social media, so almost all sites have social media buttons on their website.
So, what you do is:
- Look up the brand name in Google;
- Find the original website (it should be on the top of the search engine result page, usually);
- Find a link to their social media (you can check ours in the bottom left corner, click that red circular thing);
- Check whether it’s the same channel, group, or account that you have;
- And actually follow the link to see where it takes you.
Check the credentials
Also, look at the handle or the link. Some tricks never get out of fashion in the scammer world:
- Uppercase I (i) instead of lower case l (L);
- Letter O and number 0;
- «Lost» letters, as in Roid101 and Roids101;
- Unnecessary additions, as in Roids101_1, Napsgears, and so on.
Your only weapon here is a bit of Googling and paying a 3-second-worth of attention at the link.
Google dorks vs steroids scam
Google dorks are, like, little tools for the search bar that you can use for your search to be more effective.
For example:
- “” — if you look up «https://t.me/roids101expect1», in brackets, you’ll find our post with this link that says clearly: these clowns have nothing to do with us. Most other decent sources have the same thing;
- You can use +, -, intext, inurl, allintext, and a whole ton of other things like that. Look it up, it’s a skill worth exploring.
Why does it help? Because chances are, you’re not the first to deal with this shop, and their victims already took their time to warn others.
It’s possible to stumble upon databases as well: for example, steroidsworld has a list of over 500 scam emails, over a hundred scam mailing addresses, and 7 dozens proven scam websites, all indexed and Google-able. And they’re not alone.
Social Engineering Bros
- Where do they live: social media comment sections and groups
- Weapon of choice: talking to you
- Target audience: clients of other sources
- How to fight: ignore and don’t let them even start talking
These guys live with the motto of «fake it till you make it». Don’t have a store of your own? Well, pretend to be a representative of a whole different one, and maybe you’ll be able to scam a few unsuspecting clients.
This is how they operate:
- You, an unsuspecting client, come to some platform’s chat (for example, Steoidify’s group in Telegram);
- You’re asking questions to the mods, the store staff, or the admins;
- An unrelated account appears and starts acting like he’s the one in charge, the one you have to address;
- Unless mods notice it quick enough, the scammer will, most likely, ask you to go to DMs;
- There, they’ll do their best to trick you into placing your order through direct messages and paying them, not the store.
It’s basically impersonation, but of the lowest grade. They build their whole strategy on pretext: you are already more likely to trust them since they reacted to your call for the administration, and you assume they have authority, though they do not.
These guys act relaxeD, friendly, and often — more often than they should — use the word «bro».
How to avoid social engineering bro’s steroids scam?
First of all, keep in mind that every legitimate store is supposed to have a website with a working shopping cart.
Not just because eroids.com won’t verify you without one. We need it to analyze sales, to better work with the returning customers, to count the losses and track orders in case Canada Post messes it up again.
We just don’t WANT to sell anything directly. For any store with more than 10 orders a month, such «sales» create more mess than profit.
This is what you can do practically (and take it from a steroid store, we would prefer you to reach out instead of buying scam shit 10 times out of 10):
- Check whether the account is mentioned anywhere on the page. If yes, double-check the link;
- Ask official representatives whether the guy in your DMs works for them. Steroid shops are not megacorporations, we have small teams, close-knitted and interconnected enough to know who does what at any given moment. If it’s a legit account — we’ll just tell you;
- Another option is to simply tell that dude that you want to pay through the site. In case they start acting like it’s not the right thing to do, block the asshole and report their handle or username.
No matter what such a person says, does, shows, or claims to be: double-check it.
Take it as a warning: these guys talk to people and lie to put food on their tables. They are better at online communication than you are. They know what to say, when to say it, how to put it, and which aspects of your question to manipulate to trick you into sending them your hard-earned money. If you’re not sure you’re talking to an official representative — just block them and go look for official contacts.
The Smartass
- Where do they live: all over the Internet
- Weapon of choice: an ordinary newbie’s vices
- Target audience: people that lack common sense
- How to fight: trust your gut, approach everything critically.
Now, we move to a bit of a different league. All the previous types of scammers were… well, cheap. A social media account is free, after all. The site a smartass needs for work, most likely, costs at least something.
A typical smartass doesn’t go really deep in it: they gamble on the worst traits of human nature: greed.
Yes, we’re talking about the cheap-made sites with shitty graphics and unbelievable prices.
Take it from a steroid shop: if there was a legit source in Canada with high-quality gear for half the market price, we’d buy their whole stock out and sell it at a more reasonable, higher price, easily. And we’re not alone who’d do this.
There’s just NO justification for too low prices. Cheap gear is:
- Bunk;
- Diluted and underdosed;
- Or non-existent.
That’s it. There’s no fourth option. That’s just how the market works.
The smart ass knows it. And they know anyone with at least a few years of experience would know it. That’s why such sites usually don;t live long and look the same:
- Crappy stock design with no personality (web design is a pricy thing);
- Poor-quality, photoshopped «before and after» pictures all over the place;
- Eye-catching «too good to be true» headlines (usually something along the lines of LEGAL steroids, which do not exist);
- Checkout through PayPal or crypto only (buying a fake PayPal is cheap, they have dozens), or worse — a card form right on the site, to get all your money, not just the order price;
- And finally, the prices that look like a dollar store ad. Screaming, fluorescent colours, a crossed-out «old price», something like «CLEARANCE! ALL STOCK MUST GO!», and so on. You get the point.
A few more details, though less widespread:
- Some sites claim to sell only 2-3 products, simply because building a proper eCommerce platform with categories and a wide selection is not easy or cheap, even of you don’t have the gear in the first place;
- They know they look too good to be true, so they use anything to persuade you into believing their BS: from photoshopped Janoshik labs certificates to stolen pictures of someone else’s stock with their photoshopped logo on it;
- These sites are usually young and use cheap domains. It’s always something like legalgear.com.org, super-legit-steroids.edu.com, or geartobuynowbeststeroidsincanada.io.
How do you avoid smartass steroids scam?
Well, use your damn critical thinking. If they can sell a vial of Testosterone Cypionate for $80 CAD, why’d they sell it for $20? It’s the same thing as any other unbelievable discount.
Full-on fake stores
Oh boy, this is a whole different guide. We’ll use way more tools for it, and it’s a separate guide. Stay tuned.
Final Checklist
So, if you made it this far, congrats: your chances of avoiding steroids scam are now significantly higher.
Here’s a check-list with all the tips from above, summarized and shortened:
- Do not buy from anyone who messages you first on social media;
- When you find a store’s account on social media, verify it with their website;
- If in doubt, Google everything (link, handle, username) in brackets «like this»;
- Check the link twice — I’s are I’s and not l’s, there are no additions, nothing is missing;
- Check the source info in databases of known scammers: steroidworld, forums;
- Do not give suspicious guys a chance to talk you into a deal, if in doubt — block and don’t respond;
- Check out through the official site (check url twice) shopping cart only, be careful with your credit card or PayPal info;
- Make sure the prices are at least close to the actual market price, do not buy anything at «90% discount».
8 points that cost steroid users from all around Canada and the United States hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Again, though: If you check all the brackets and everything is seemingly OK, but you feel like something is not right anyway — drop it. Go buy elsewhere. Trust your gut on this one, scammers are always evolving.
Stay safe and don’t buy shit!
