Biopharmaceutical Giant Amgen Asked Feds to Shut Down UGL Selling Counterfeit Steroids Under Onyx Pharmaceutical Label

Tyler “White Pride “Bauman, known online by his Musclehead320 persona, thought he was pretty clever using the registered trademark and logos of a real pharmaceutical company to help him market and sell steroids that he manufactured. Onyx Pharmaceuticals sounded like a cool. And it already had a cool logo. All Bauman needed to do was copy the name and logo and print out some labels for his steroid products.

Even though Bauman (operating as Musclehead320) was pretty open and blatant about the illegal steroid trade on social media and Internet forums, law enforcement didn’t pay any attention to his activities. He probably would have been busted eventually regardless of which name he chose for his steroid UGL products.

Bauman’s decision to use the Onyx Pharmaceuticals trademark guaranteed that his downfall would happen sooner rather than later. Bauman apparently tricked some of his customers into believing he was selling steroids diverted from a legitimate pharmaceutical company. At least one of his customers had serious doubts about the legitimacy of the Onyx Pharma products. 

When that customer received his shipment from Bauman, he decided to go to the official Onyx Pharmaceuticals website and ask about the legitimacy of the injectable steroid products that he received. The only problem was that the Onyx Pharmaceuticals website was owned by the $120 billion biopharmaceutical giant Amgen.

The Onyx Pharmaceuticals name and logo were trademarks that were registered and in-use by Amgen. And Amgen didn’t take kindly to some musclehead using their trademarks to sell counterfeited low-quality steroids on the Internet black market.

After Amgen received the email query about the liquid vials of injectable steroid drugs on May 29, 2015, it decided to conduct its own private investigation into what appeared to be a major counterfeiting problem involving trademarks used by its subsidiary, Onyx Pharmaceuticals. It hired its own private investigators who scoured the Internet for the source of the counterfeit steroid products. They quickly located several of the Instagram accounts used by Musclehead320 to sell counterfeited Onyx products including the onyx_roid Instagram account. 

An Amgen private investigator, posing as the customer Roy Rodriguez, contacted the email address posted on the onyx_roid Instragram account. He quickly received an autoresponse containing a product list. “Roy Rodriguez” decided to order three vials of Onyx Pharma Tren (trenbolone acetate) and three vials of “TestE” (testosterone enanthate) for a total price of $300.  A few days later, he received his order on August 8, 2015. With the receipt of products, the investigators confirmed that products were indeed counterfeited products containing the Onyx trademarks owned by Amgen.

Amgen turned over this information to the Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) on November 30, 2015. As noted in the criminal complaint, HSI and the Department of Justice are “especially concerned with counterfeit products that implicate a public health and safety concern”. Federal investigators devoted significant time and resources over the next 18 months to build a case to shut down Bauman’s countefeiting UGL

This resulted in the arrest of six individuals, including Bauman and his fiancee, on charges of “conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit steroids, including testosterone and trenbolone, which are illegally used for body building” on April 12, 2017.