How crypto made and undid the $100M Incognito dark web market

The creator of Incognito Market, the online black market that used crypto as its economic heart, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after some blockchain sleuthing led US authorities straight to the platform’s steward.

The Justice Department said on Wednesday that a Manhattan court gave Rui-Siang Lin three decades behind bars for owning and operating Incognito, which sold $105 million worth of illicit narcotics between its launch in October 2020 and its closure in March 2024.

Lin, who pleaded guilty to his role in December 2024, was sentenced for conspiring to distribute narcotics, money laundering, and conspiring to sell misbranded medication.

Incognito allowed users to buy and sell drugs using Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero ($XMR) while taking a 5% cut, and Lin’s undoing ultimately came after the FBI traced the platform’s crypto to an account in Lin’s name at a crypto exchange.

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

Source: US Attorney SDNY

In addition to prison time, Lin was sentenced to five years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $105 million in forfeiture.

Crypto tracing led FBI right to Lin

In March 2024, the Justice Department said Lin closed Incognito and stole at least $1 million that its users had deposited in their accounts on the platform.

Lin, known online as “Pharoah,” then attempted to blackmail Incognito’s users, demanding that buyers and vendors pay him or he would publicly share their user history and crypto addresses.

Lin wrote “YES, THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!” in a post to Incognito’s website. Source: Department of Justice

Months later, in May 2024, authorities arrested Lin, a Taiwanese national, at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport after the FBI tied him to Incognito partly by tracing the platform’s crypto transfers to a crypto exchange account in Lin’s name.

The FBI said a crypto wallet that Lin controlled received funds from a known wallet of Incognito’s, and those funds were then sent to Lin’s exchange account.

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The agency said it traced at least four transfers showing Lin’s crypto wallet sent Bitcoin originally from Incognito to a “swapping service” to exchange it for $XMR, which was then deposited to the exchange account.

The exchange gave the FBI a photo of Lin’s Taiwanese driver’s license used to open the account, along with an email address and phone number, and the agency tied the email and number to an account at the web domain registrar Namecheap.

The Namecheap account also used funds from Lin’s crypto wallet and exchange account to buy a domain for a website that promoted Incognito, the FBI said.

The agency added that the size of Lin’s deposits at the exchange grew alongside Incognito, starting from around $63,000 in 2021 to nearly $4.2 million over the course of 2023, while an account at a separate exchange saw $4.5 million deposited between July and November 2023.

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