Operator of Crypto-Fueled Dark Web Drug Market Sentenced to 30 Years

A Taiwanese national who built a crypto-fueled dark web narcotics empire worth over $105 million while moonlighting as a cybercrime trainer for Caribbean police has been sentenced to three decades in federal prison.

Rui-Siang Lin received the 30-year sentence for operating Incognito Market under the pseudonym “Pharoah,” overseeing a digital drug bazaar that sold more than one ton of narcotics, including fentanyl-laced pills, to over 400,000 buyers worldwide between October 2020 and March 2024, according to a statement from the U.S. 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 selling adulterated medication.

“Today’s sentence puts traffickers on notice: you cannot hide in the shadows of the Internet,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in the statement. “And our larger message is simple: the internet, ‘decentralization,’ ‘blockchain’—any technology—is not a license to operate a narcotics distribution business.”   

Incognito Market worked as a crypto-enabled dark web platform accessible via Tor that enabled more than 1,800 vendors to carry out over 640,000 narcotics transactions, including cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, MDMA, and misbranded prescription drugs.

To enable anonymous crypto transactions, Incognito Market maintained its own internal “bank” where users deposited crypto into personal accounts. 

After each transaction, crypto was transferred from the buyer’s to the seller’s account, minus the 5% commission that funded operations and generated over $6 million in profits for Lin.

While managing Incognito from St. Lucia, Lin conducted a four-day training session for local police on “Cybercrime and Cryptocurrency,” later bragging about it on Facebook.

In January 2022, Lin introduced a policy explicitly allowing opiate sales on the platform, which led to fraudulent prescription drug listings, and a 27-year-old Arkansas resident later died after taking purported oxycodone purchased on Incognito Market that was laced with fentanyl.

Lin shuttered the platform in 2024 after stealing at least $1 million from users’ deposits in the Incognito Bank. 

He then attempted to extort vendors and buyers on the site while threatening to publish their transaction histories and crypto addresses unless they paid him.

Homeland Security Investigations arrested Lin at John F. Kennedy International Airport in May 2024, following a multi-agency investigation involving the FBI, DEA, FDA, and NYPD.

Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs at TRM Labs, told Decrypt the sentence “reflects how courts now view large darkweb markets as core infrastructure of the illicit underbelly of the crypto ecosystem, not fringe platforms.”

“While it falls short of the life-level outcomes in cases like Silk Road and AlphaBay, pardons aside, it still sends a clear message that running these platforms carries consequences comparable to major organized crime,” Redbord added.

In addition to the 30-year prison term, Lin was sentenced to five years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $105 million.