I Bought Fake Chinese Supplements Off the Internet So You Don't Have To

I have been selling supplements out of Dublin since 2013. In May I bought five bottles of Alpha Brain from a website I had never heard of, knowing more or less what was going to turn up.

I bought them because of the price. Not a good price, an impossible one. It was below what we pay Onnit as their official Irish stockist, which means it was below what the brand charges the people licensed to sell it. There is no legitimate route to that number. Somebody either had stolen stock, expired stock, or no real stock at all.

I wanted to see which. Onnit have since confirmed the answer, which I will come to.

It was a Google ad

Here is the part I did not expect to be writing.

I did not go hunting for this in some obscure corner of the internet. It was served to me, at the top of a Google search, as a paid advertisement. Above the organic results. Above the brand's own authorised stockists.

That matters more than it sounds. Nearly every guide to avoiding counterfeits, ours included, quietly assumes you went and found the seller. This one found me, in the slot on the page most people read as a kind of endorsement.

We buy Google ads ourselves, so I know precisely what that position costs and precisely how little it proves about who is paying for it. Ad placement is an auction, not a credential. Somebody willing to spend on clicks can sit above a thirteen-year-old licensed stockist all day.

So add one to the checklist: being at the top of the page is not a signal. The paid results and the organic results are different things, and only one of them is earned.

A month later

The parcel took about a month. That on its own tells you something, because a real distributor with real stock does not take a month to move five bottles.

I no longer have the outer packaging or the paperwork, which is my own fault and a mistake worth passing on. If you ever suspect you have been sent a counterfeit, keep the envelope, the customs declaration and anything that came with it. The declaration is the interesting one: it records what the sender told customs the goods were and what they claimed they were worth, and on shipments like this that is frequently a work of fiction. I threw mine out before I knew I would be writing about it.

And then there was the free gift.

I had not asked for one. Nobody asks for one. Sitting in the box alongside five bottles of a cognitive supplement was a small bottle of penis enlargement oil, thrown in as a bonus.

It is still in the drawer, unopened. I mention it partly because it is funny and partly because it is not only funny. A supplier who thinks that belongs in a box with a nootropic is telling you what the rest of their catalogue looks like, and as it turns out, they were right about that. More on it further down.

What was actually wrong with them

Start with the obvious. It is not Onnit's packaging.

A real Alpha Brain bottle is orange and black. The ONNIT name runs down the side of the label. There is a registered trademark symbol after the product name, because Onnit own the trademark and put it there.

What arrived was a black bottle covered in botanical line drawings, with a stock photograph of a white flower on it and "Daily Cognitive Support" set in a script font. No trademark symbol. And the brand's own name appears nowhere on the front of the bottle at all, which for a product whose entire value is the brand is a remarkable thing to leave off.

Here is the odd part. It does loosely resemble packaging Onnit used years ago and discontinued. Whoever produced this was working from an out-of-date reference, copying a design that had already been retired. And even measured against that old design it is a poor job. The proportions are off and the typography does not hold together.

That is worth knowing if you are checking your own bottle, because it means matching your packaging against an old image you found somewhere is not enough. Match it against what the brand is selling today.

The tell that settles it

Turn both bottles over.

The genuine one carries a laser-etched code on the base: a lot number and an expiry date, printed crisply in yellow. That lot number is what makes a recall possible. If a batch goes wrong, it is the thread that connects a bottle in your kitchen to a run in a factory.

The counterfeit has a manufacture date and an expiry date, printed twice and slightly ghosted. No lot number. None.

That omission is not carelessness. Dates make a bottle look legitimate at a glance, so they printed dates. A lot number is the one code that makes a product traceable back to whoever made it, which is precisely what somebody selling counterfeits does not want.

I have not opened one, and I am not going to.

All five are still sealed. An unopened bottle from an untouched batch is worth considerably more as evidence than a photograph of some powder on a plate, and if Onnit want them they will get them intact. I also do not need to see inside to know what the outside already tells me.

Who sold it to me

The seller was called MantroForce.

I sent the photographs to Onnit and they came back the same day. Definitely a fake. That is the brand who own the formula, the trademark and the artwork saying it plainly, and it counts for a great deal more than thirteen years of my opinion.

One detail from their reply is worth passing on, because it makes the point better than I managed to. Their first thought was that we might be looking at two different production lots, one older and one newer, before they looked properly and concluded it was counterfeit. Even at the brand, the initial instinct was that odd packaging might just be an old batch. That is exactly the trap described further up, and it is precisely why you check against what a brand is selling now rather than against an old photograph you found somewhere.

Two other things are a matter of public record, and I found them after the fact rather than before.

On 17 June 2026 the US Food and Drug Administration issued MantroForce a warning letter. It gives the company's address as an office in New Mandarin Plaza, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, and finds five of its own-brand products to be unapproved new drugs marketed with claims of the "get a rock-hard erection within 5 minutes" variety (FDA).

Two performance sprays, a nasal inhaler, a prostate gel and a set of prostate patches. Which is to say that the free gift they dropped into a box of cognitive supplements sat squarely in the category a federal regulator would write to them about weeks later.

Worth being precise about what that letter does and does not say. The FDA was writing about MantroForce's own branded products and its own marketing claims. It says nothing whatsoever about Alpha Brain, and I am not suggesting otherwise. The counterfeit finding is Onnit's, based on the bottles in the photographs above. Two separate facts about the same company, and both of them true.

Their public review profile is worth thirty seconds as well: a run of near-identical five-star entries praising vague benefits, each with a warm reply from the company, and underneath them the occasional one-star review complaining that delivery took forever and the product did nothing.

So what do you actually do about it

If you are reading this because you have a bottle in front of you and you are not sure, here is the order I would go in.

Check the base first. Look for a lot or batch number, not just an expiry date. Missing lot number is close to conclusive on its own.

Compare against the brand's current packaging, from the brand's own website, not from a search-image result. Retired designs are exactly what counterfeiters copy, and as Onnit's own reply shows, an old-looking label can fool anybody for a moment.

Look for the trademark symbol and the brand name, and check the spelling of everything on the label. Counterfeiters are copying artwork rather than working from brand files, and small errors survive.

Photograph it and send it to the brand. Most take this seriously and will tell you quickly. Onnit answered me the same day. It costs you an email.

Do not take it. You do not know what is in it. If you have already been taking something you now think is counterfeit and you feel unwell, talk to a pharmacist or your GP rather than guessing.

Why this keeps happening

Counterfeiting concentrates on whatever people search for by name. Alpha Brain has been a target for years, largely because of the podcast attention that made it famous in the first place. Popularity is the vulnerability.

The wider machinery has got easier too. Anyone can stand up a professional-looking storefront in an afternoon, fill it with generated copy and a wall of five-star reviews, and take card payments from another continent. The bottleneck used to be looking legitimate. It is not any more.

We wrote the general version of this as a checklist: the red flags to watch for when buying supplements online. Everything in it, I walked into deliberately and with my eyes open. Somebody doing it accidentally, with one bottle and no comparison to hand, has almost no chance.

There is also a duller reason the maths tempted me in the first place. Ordering from outside the EU costs more than the sticker price suggests, and since July it costs more again, which makes a too-good price look like a bargain rather than a warning. That is its own subject and we have covered it separately: what an order from outside the EU actually costs to land in Ireland.

The point of all this

I am not going to pretend this was a public service from start to finish. I clicked because the number was interesting, the same as anybody would.

What I got for the money was five bottles of something I will never sell, never take, and now have on the brand's own authority is counterfeit, plus a bottle of oil I did not ask for. What you get is the photographs, which is a better deal than I got.

The genuine article is on a shelf in Dublin. We are Onnit's official Irish stockist, so the Alpha Brain we sell came from Onnit rather than from a middleman, and it ships from here rather than through a clearance queue. Order by 4pm and it goes the same day.

That is the sales pitch and it is the only one in the article. Everything above it is true whether you buy from us or not.

Updated 8 September 2026. The original version of this article said the counterfeit judgement was mine and that I would report back either way once Onnit had seen the photographs. They have now confirmed the product is counterfeit, and the article has been amended to say so.

If you believe you have bought a counterfeit supplement, stop taking it and contact the brand directly. If you feel unwell, speak to a pharmacist or your GP. This article is general information and is not medical advice.