In recent weeks the Moderator team was alerted to an accusation that one of our Canadian "verified sources" was participating in shilling, namely by creating a number of throwaway accounts that would be used to leave positive feedback for the source, thereby falsely inflating its reputation. In order to evaluate the validity of this claim, the moderators exhaustively combed through profiles of accounts that had posted in the accused source’s thread in search of evidence. The moderator team identified accounts of concern as ones that had short online times, low post counts, and were registered to proxies and mobile IPs. In order to ensure that our count was not biased, we completed the same task for each of the other Canadian sources in order to compare numbers and establish ratios of “accounts of concern” to “regular accounts” as well as “accounts of concern” to page views. The results of this task revealed that the accused source did not appear to have a suspicious number of bumps or positive anecdotal reviews when compared to other sources.
However, one Canadian source did. Pareto Pharmaceuticals was found to have a disproportionate number of anecdotal reviews and bumps from newly created accounts, many of which are registered to proxies or mobile IPs for the apparent sole purpose of shilling. No other source on the board has a remotely similar number of reviews from newly created accounts that have not posted outside of the source thread, regardless of page views or known sales volume. A similar discovery was addressed several months ago where the source continuously deleted posts in his “source page” before responding to them with the same post in order to bump the thread to the top of the “source page” section.
Soon after the shilling was discovered, the Moderator team was also alerted to various lab tests that were posted by the Pareto Rep on another well-known board. One of these tests was edited by the Rep in order to falsely report the results. This test, when pulled directly from the Jano website, showed the true results indicated overdosing of an oral compound by 25-50%, with a variance between tablets of more than 20%. Unfortunately, the Rep chose to hide these results rather than address and/or correct the issue. This is especially concerning to the Moderators as the source continues to sell items labelled with microgram specific dosing, but fails to dose oral anabolics within 10mg of accuracy.
In response to the above revelations, the Moderator team has decided to remove Pareto Pharmaceuticals, effectively immediately, based on the following summary reasons:
- Overwhelming evidence of shilling, including using proxy generated accounts to unduly increase the reputation of the source.
- Altering of 3rd party analytical results in order to unduly add to the positive reputation of the source’s products.
- Failure to address the initial 3rd party analytical results which indicated a dosing inaccuracy of 50% (10mg). This level of inaccurate dosing is simply not unacceptable from a public safety perspective.
This decision is not one that has been made lightly, however we encourage all to take this as a learning opportunity at this time. Sources, if discovered to be participating in shilling or practices that are deceptive to the members of our community, will be held accountable and removed accordingly. The Moderators make a concerted effort to prevent subpar sources from reaching our community, and continue to monitor the trustworthiness of these sources long after initial acceptance onto the board, and passed the point of verification
