In summary
- Rui-Siang Lin operated Incognito Market, facilitating more than $105 million in cryptocurrency-based narcotics sales in 640,000 transactions from October 2020 to March 2024.
- The exchange used an internal crypto “bank” system, where vendors paid 5% commissions, generating more than $6 million in profits for Lin.
- Lin shut down the platform after stealing at least $1 million in user deposits and attempting extortion before his arrest at JFK airport.
A Taiwanese national who built a cryptocurrency-powered dark web narcotics empire worth more than $105 million while working as a cybercrime instructor for Caribbean police has been sentenced to three decades in federal prison.
Rui-Siang Lin received a 30-year sentence for operating Incognito Market under the pseudonym “Pharoah,” overseeing a digital drug bazaar that sold more than a ton of narcotics, including fentanyl-laced pills, to more than 400,000 buyers worldwide between October 2020 and March 2024, according to a statement of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon handed down the sentence following Lin’s guilty plea to conspiracy to distribute narcotics, money laundering and sale of adulterated medications.
“Today’s sentencing puts traffickers on notice: they cannot hide in the shadows of the Internet,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in the statement. “And our broader message is simple: the Internet, ‘decentralization,’ ‘blockchain’ (any technology) is not a license to operate a narcotics distribution business.”
Incognito Market operated as a cryptocurrency-enabled dark web platform accessible through Tor that enabled more than 1,800 vendors to conduct more than 640,000 narcotics transactions, including cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, MDMA, and mislabeled prescription drugs.
To enable anonymous crypto transactions, Incognito Market maintained its own internal “bank” where users deposited cryptocurrencies into personal accounts.
After each transaction, cryptocurrencies were transferred from the buyer’s account to the seller’s account, minus the 5% commission that funded the trades and generated more than $6 million in profits for Lin.
While managing Incognito from Saint Lucia, Lin conducted a four-day training session for local police on “Cybercrime and Cryptocurrencies,” and later bragged about it on Facebook.
In January 2022, Lin introduced a policy explicitly allowing the sale of opioids on the platform, which led to fraudulent prescription drug listings, and a 27-year-old Arkansas resident later died after taking suspected oxycodone purchased from Incognito Market that was laced with fentanyl.
Lin shut down the platform in 2024 after stealing at least $1 million of user deposits at Incognito Bank.
He then attempted to extort suppliers and buyers on the site while threatening to publish their transaction histories and crypto addresses unless they paid him.
national security investigations arrested Lin at John F. Kennedy International Airport in May 2024, following a multi-agency investigation involving the FBI, DEA, FDA, and the NYPD.
Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs at TRM Labs, said Decipher The phrase “reflects how courts now view large dark web marketplaces as core infrastructure of the illicit underbelly of the crypto ecosystem, not as fringe platforms.”
“While it falls short of the life-level results in cases like Silk Road and AlphaBay, pardons aside, it still sends a clear message that running these platforms carries consequences comparable to those of organized crime,” Redbord added.
In addition to the 30-year prison sentence, Lin was sentenced to five years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $105 million.
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