“Incognito Market” Owner Sentenced To 30 Years For Operating One Of The World’s Largest Online Narcotics Marketplaces

Rui-Siang Lin Used the Identity of “Pharaoh” to Operate Incognito Market, Which Sold More Than $105 Million of Illegal Narcotics to Customers Around the World United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, announced that RUI-SIANG LIN was sentenced to 30 years in prison for conspiring to distribute narcotics, money laundering, and conspiring to sell adulterated and misbranded medication, in connection with LIN’s ownership and operation of the Incognito Market, an online narcotics marketplace that sold more than one ton of narcotics before its closure in March 2024. On December 16, 2024, LIN pled guilty before U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, who imposed today’s sentence. “Rui-Siang Lin was one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers, using the internet to sell more than $105 million of illegal drugs throughout this country and across the globe,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. “While Lin made millions, his offenses had devastating consequences. He is responsible for at least one tragic death, and he exacerbated the opioid crisis and caused misery for more than 470,000 narcotics users and their families. Today’s sentence puts traffickers on notice: you cannot hide in the shadows of the Internet. And our larger message is simple: the internet, ‘decentralization,’ ‘blockchain’—any technology—is not a license to operate a narcotics distribution business.” According to court documents and the evidence presented in connection with today’s sentencing: Incognito Market was an online narcotics bazaar that existed on the dark web. Incognito Market formed in October 2020. Since that time, and through its closing in March 2024, Incognito Market sold more than $105 million of narcotics—including more than 1,000 kilograms of cocaine, over 1,000 kilograms of methamphetamines, hundreds of kilograms of other narcotics, and more than 4 kilograms of purported “oxycodone,” some of which were laced with fentanyl. Incognito Market was available globally to anyone with internet access and could be accessed using the Tor web browser on the “dark web” or “darknet.” LIN operated the Incognito market under the online pseudonym “Pharaoh.” As “Pharaoh”—the leader of Incognito market—LIN supervised all of its operations, including its employees, vendors, and customers, and had ultimate decision-making authority over every aspect of the multimillion-dollar operation. Incognito Market was designed to foster seamless narcotics transactions across the internet and the world, and incorporated many features of legitimate e-commerce sites such as branding, advertising, and customer service. After logging in with a unique username and password, users were able to search thousands of listings for narcotics of their choice. Incognito Market sold illegal narcotics and misbranded prescription medication, including heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, oxycodone, methamphetamines, ketamine, and alprazolam. Each listing on Incognito Market was sold by a particular vendor. To become an Incognito Market vendor, each vendor was required to register with the site and pay an admission fee. In exchange for listing and selling narcotics as a vendor on Incognito Market, each vendor paid 5% of the purchase price of every narcotic sold to Incognito Market. That revenue funded Incognito Market’s operations, including paying “employee” salaries and for computer servers. LIN collected more than $6 million in profits from Incognito. To facilitate these financial transactions, Incognito Market had its own “bank” (the “Incognito Bank”), which allowed its users to deposit cryptocurrency on the site into their own “bank accounts.” After a narcotics transaction was completed, cryptocurrency from the buyer’s “bank account” was transferred to the seller’s “bank account,” less the 5% fee that Incognito collected. The bank enabled buyers and sellers to stay anonymous from each other. LIN was a founding member of the Incognito Market in October 2020, and led the site as of approximately January 2022, until LIN closed it in March 2024. LIN ran the site while based in, among other places, St. Lucia. Remarkably, while LIN was managing Incognito, he led a four-day training for St. Lucian police officers about “Cybercrime and Cryptocurrency,” which he bragged about on his personal Facebook page. Due to LIN’s leadership and sophisticated computer coding abilities, the Incognito Market grew its customer base to more than 400,000 buyer accounts. Those hundreds of thousands of buyers were serviced by more than 1,800 narcotics “vendors,” many of which were serious drug traffickers in their own right. In total, Lin’s Incognito Market facilitated more than 640,000 individual narcotics transactions. On January 22, 2022, Lin announced a new Incognito policy that explicitly permitted its vendors to sell opiates on the site. As a result, Incognito listings included offerings of prescription medication that was advertised as being authentic but was not. For example, in November 2023, an undercover law enforcement agent received several tablets that purported to be “oxycodone,” which were purchased on Incognito Market. Testing on those tablets revealed that they were not authentic oxycodone at all and were, in fact, fentanyl pills. Tragically, on September 13, 2022, a 27-year-old from Arkansas died from consuming purported “oxycodone” that he purchased on the Incognito Market. That “oxycodone” was laced with fentanyl. In March 2024, Lin closed Incognito by stealing at least $1 million that its users had on deposit in the Incognito Bank. In addition, Lin attempted to extort his coconspirators. LIN demanded that the Incognito buyers and vendors pay him, or he would publish their user history and cryptocurrency addresses online. In a posting on the Incognito site, LIN wrote “YES, THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!.” In imposing the sentence, Judge McMahon stated to the defendant that Incognito Market was “a business that made [him] a drug kingpin," and that this was the “most serious drug crime I have ever been confronted with in 27.5 years.” In addition to the prison term, LIN, 24, of Taiwan, was sentenced to five years of supervised release and $105,045,109.67 in forfeiture.