Rui-Siang Lin, also known as Ruisiang Lin, 林睿庠, Pharoah, and faro, 23, of Taiwan, was arrested today in connection with his operation and ownership of “Incognito Market,” an online dark web narcotics marketplace that enabled its users to buy and sell illegal narcotics anonymously around the world. Lin was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport on May 18, and will be presented in Manhattan federal court before U.S. Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000. The bold mass extortion attempt comes just days after Incognito Market administrators reportedly pulled an “exit scam” that left users unable to withdraw millions of dollars worth of funds from the platform. If convicted, Lin faces a mandatory minimum penalty of life in prison for engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise. He could also receive a maximum penalty of life in prison for narcotics conspiracy, a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for money laundering, and a maximum penalty of five years in prison for conspiracy to sell adulterated and misbranded medication.
Dark web search engines support dark web marketplaces and allow users to use them, but still accessing them is full of risks; they can infect your device with malware or viruses, and can bring other legal consequences. Therefore, you must know how to access dark web marketplaces safely (covered later in this article). McDonald recruited and hired accomplices to help package and ship the narcotics they sold on the darknet. McDonald directed and helped these accomplices package and ship the narcotics. McDonald purchased bulk quantities of fentanyl and cocaine and then directed others to complete hundreds of drug sales involving large quantities of both fentanyl and cocaine.
Pedophile Pleads Guilty To Taking Photos Of Minors And Posting Them To The Dark Web
Upon visiting the site via the Tor browser, users were greeted by a graphic interface and prompted to log in with a unique username and password. Inside, buyers could browse thousands of drug listings, many accompanied by reviews and ratings. The platform also featured prescription drug listings falsely marketed as authentic, and some products were outright scams—counterfeit pills advertised as legitimate pharmaceuticals. At the same time the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried engineering an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market’s relatively quiet first year, Lin’s alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and let users check—for a fee—whether their cryptocurrency could be connected to criminal transactions.
Darknet Dream Market Reddit
One of the key features that sets Incognito Market apart is that it uses Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, as its primary payment method. Monero allows our Incognito customers to make purchases with complete anonymity, providing additional protection from external participants in the Incognito darknet link market. 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.
Silk Road And Early Markets
Operation RapTor resulted in the highest number of seizures of any JCODE operation, including more than $200 million in currency and digital assets, over two metric tons of drugs, 144 kilograms of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics, and over 180 firearms. U.S. authorities have arrested and charged a Taiwanese national with operating darknet drug bazaar Incognito Market, which he allegedly used to facilitate over $100 million in crypto-denominated sales of illegal narcotics including fentanyl. Incognito, like other modern darknet platforms, operated entirely on cryptocurrency—primarily Bitcoin and Monero. Buyers and sellers used wallets controlled either directly or through third-party mixers and exchanges. While Monero obscures transaction details, Bitcoin’s traceable blockchain provided law enforcement with critical leads, particularly at the point of off-ramp—when vendors converted crypto into fiat or moved assets through centralized exchanges.
Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the FBI’s New York and Cincinnati field offices, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations’ Kansas City field office, and the New York City Police Department. On the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, where he has been active since March 2022, most of Lin’s posts are about cryptocurrencies. He also posted about the training he did for the Saint Lucia Police, but this time, he covered his face with an emoji. In an interesting post, he appeared to be proud of the newly elected president in Taiwan, suggesting that he likes the current regime, which is opposing China’s pressure. He also posted an analysis from Cloudflare showing that his DDoS solutions passed a stress test from China-based IPs.
- Other than the Silk Road 2.0, similar marketplaces also emerged, but they all went down sooner or later.
- Listings included offerings of prescription medication that was falsely advertised as being authentic.
- A dark web search engine like DuckDuckGo offers impressive anonymity features and makes it easy to access the shops.
- Matthew Podolsky, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today that GREI MENDEZ was sentenced to 45 years in prison for trafficking fentanyl out…
- Thank you for choosing Incognito Link as your marketplace for purchasing Darknet goods.
Examining Listings From Incognito Vendors
Patterns recommended to avoid include hiring hitmen like Dread Pirate Roberts, and sharing handles for software questions on sites like Stack Exchange. Whilst a great many products are sold, drugs dominate the numbers of listings, with the drugs including cannabis, MDMA, modafinil,108109110 LSD, cocaine, and designer drugs. “This arrest underscores the dedicated, ongoing efforts of law enforcement to identify and dismantle illicit drug networks operating from every shadowy recess of the marketplace,” NYPD Commissioner Edward A. Caban said in a statement. A dark web search engine like DuckDuckGo offers impressive anonymity features and makes it easy to access the shops.
But by late 2021, Incognito had started to attract users, and by the middle of 2022, the market had drawn enough vendors and sellers to generate more than $1.5 million a month in sales. In the DOJ’s criminal complaint against Lin, it points to a handwritten document the FBI pulled from his email, which appears to sketch out a flow chart for a dark-web market’s mechanics. The complaint’s FBI affidavit says Lin emailed himself the sketch in March 2020 when he was at most 19 years old. It describes functionality such as how “vendors” and “buyers” would register, make purchases, and encrypt shipping addresses. Investigation of crypto transactions that led to the arrest of Riu-Siang Lin shows that threat actors and criminals in the underground forums cannot operate alone and without leaving any traces when switching to real life.
Darknet Drugs
Rui-Siang Lin is a 23-year-old developer who describes himself on LinkedIn as a “crypto enthusiast and developer” from Taiwan. He claims to be an employee of Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working as a “diplomatic specialist” in the technical section of the Taiwanese embassy in St Lucia. Previous jobs include a three-year internship at Cathay Financial Holding as a “Backend and Blockchain R&D” since November 2019.
Incognito Market Features
In addition, several fake websites impersonate the famous dark net marketplace to obtain your financial and personal information and use it for malicious purposes. U.S. agencies like the FBI, DEA, IRS-CI, and HSI worked alongside Europol, the U.K.’s NCA, and law enforcement from over a dozen countries. At the same time, financial enforcers like OFAC sanctioned individuals running darknet markets—including Iranian national Behrouz Parsarad of Nemesis—demonstrating how financial tools are being brought into alignment with traditional law enforcement.
Access Our Coverage Of TRON, Solana And 23 Other Blockchains
The marketplace extensively vets vendors listed within its deep web environment that offer a wide range of product portfolios, including security solutions, digital services, and specialized equipment. It stands as a reliable alternative to the defunct Alphabay Market as it continues to position itself as the premier source for advanced privacy-focused digital commerce. It brings unique set of features and options that weren’t seen before until now.
Administrators of the site then reportedly began extorting vendors, ordering them to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000, depending on their size, or else risk having their customers’ data leaked. Just as Incognito built on the playbook of its predecessors, future markets will learn from RapTor. But with blockchain intelligence advancing and global partnerships strengthening, law enforcement is better positioned than ever to detect, disrupt, and dismantle these operations. During those same busy years, Pharoah also launched a web service called Antinalysis, designed to defeat crypto money laundering countermeasures—only for Lin, who prosecutors say controlled that Pharoah persona, to later refashion himself as a crypto-focused law enforcement trainer. Finally, despite his supposed expertise in cryptocurrency tracing and digital privacy, it was Lin’s own relatively sloppy money trails that, the DOJ claims, helped the FBI to trace his real identity. Over the past two years, Incognito Onion has continued to evolve, adding new features and improving the user experience.
Easy – Extremely Simple How To Use Monero (Video Tutorial)
We can ensure that our market has carefully cared to every one of our users security needs. We have employed only the most modern styling to our market, this means that we have made everything very easy for all users, even your grandma could order a kilo on Incognito!. He recommends verifying market employees carefully, and to weed out law enforcement infiltration through barium meal tests.
