To facilitate the millions of dollars in transactions, Incognito Market had its own “bank,” allowing users to deposit cryptocurrency into “bank accounts” that would transfer the agreed-upon amount to a seller’s “bank account” minus Lin’s 5% fee. Prosecutors said the online marketplace allowed users to anonymously buy and sell illegal drugs from anywhere on the globe with an internet connection and a Tor web browser, a tool that makes it difficult to track users. However, depending on how much Riu-Sian Lin knows about other accounts that could expose the criminal’s identity, we will see in the next period of time in the other law enforcement takedown and arrest operations.
Monero allows our Incognito customers to make purchases with complete anonymity, providing additional protection from external participants in the Incognito darknet link market. This hypothesis may sound explainable considering the exit scheme happening in March 2024 with Incognito Marketplace. Therefore, after a month, he began to post images with training provided to some law enforcement agents in order to appear clean on a basic OSINT check or if any traces from Darkweb could lead to him. However, the gambler’s fallacy to conduct an exit scam and extort the loyal members of Incognito may have caused his downfall. The marketplace has been active since July 1, 2023, and has been among the top five infamous marketplaces providing shopping for illicit goods in the darkweb, offering more than 16 categories of narcotics and over 1000 products. Compared to other marketplaces, it offered innovative and a much more user-friendly interface.
- Incognito strives to grow by introducing our company to our customers and using the Incognito marketplace as large format specialty stores for products and services to further deepen their familiarity with them.
- Credible reporting from the referenced agencies, in addition to contributions from ATF; Army CID; CBP; Department of Treasury’s FinCEN and Office of Foreign Assets Control; and NCIS enabled domestic law enforcement actions in support of Operation RapTOR.
- Lin announced that Incognito Market would be shutting down, but not before attempting to extort the market’s users.
- Incognito Market was available globally to anyone with internet access and could be accessed using the Tor web browser on the dark web.
- Initiated in October 2020, Incognito Market quickly rose to infamy, facilitating over $100 million in illicit drug transactions until its closure in March 2024.
In addition, all data is encrypted with PGP keys, ensuring that your data never leaves the Incognito darknet. Drug vendors on the darknet site paid a fee to register and a commission of 5% on every sale, revenue that prosecutors say funded Lin’s “employee” expenses and computer servers. “As ‘Pharoah’ – the leader of Incognito Market – Lin supervised all of its operations, including its employees, vendors and customers, and had ultimate decision-making authority,” the release noted.
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Building on the successes of prior years’ operations, Operation RapTOR furthered global efforts to dismantle darknet marketplaces, resulting in the seizure of darknet infrastructure from Nemesis, Tor2Door, Bohemia, and Kingdom Markets. These actions provided investigators across the globe with invaluable leads and evidence, strengthening the ongoing fight against cybercrime and illicit activities on the darknet. As Lin suddenly shuttered the Incognito Market in March 2024, he tried pulling an exit scam stealing the users’ funds stored in its escrow system and also tried to ransom the market’s drug vendors.
Tag Archives: Incognito Market
While this week’s takedown recalls the 2013 shutdown of Silk Road, the evolution of darknet commerce is stark. Silk Road popularized the use of Bitcoin, anonymizing technologies like Tor, and vendor reputation systems. Those wishing to trade on Incognito Markets can register by paying a vendor fee of €650 (payable in XMR). All vendor applications are manually reviewed and vendors are required to provide documentation of past history and/or product availability. Over the past two years, Incognito Onion has continued to evolve, adding new features and improving the user experience.
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As law enforcement agencies followed the money trail, they eventually connected the cryptocurrency transactions to a digital wallet that had been linked to Lin. Additionally, Lin made the critical mistake of using identifiable personal information at some point during his operations, which law enforcement was able to capture. This could have been during the registration of online accounts or through other transactions that required some form of identification. The bank also offered an “escrow” service enabling both buyers and customers to have additional security concerning their narcotics transactions.
Investigations
Court documents reveal that the FBI executed search warrants on the marketplace’s servers in 2022 and again in 2023. “There’s a larger issue here about bad actors accessing blockchain analytics tools,” says Robinson. Vendors paid five percent of the purchase price of every sale to “Incognito Market,” providing Lin with millions of dollars of profits, the Justice Department said.
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“Pharao” created the Incognito marketplace when he was just a student, probably trying to make more money. On May 21, after online media wrote about Rui-Siang’s arrest and rumors spread throughout the darknet community, ‘MommaBear’, one of the administrators of the SuperMarket darknet marketplace, posted on Dread that the Cold Storage Escrow and Joint Pocket wallets had been emptied. The legal case against Rui-Siang Lin is being prosecuted in the Southern District of New York, a jurisdiction known for tackling high-profile cybercrime and narcotics cases. Once Lin was in custody, the indictment against him was unsealed, revealing an array of serious charges. Lin was accused of being the principal operator of a Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) – often referred to as the “kingpin” or “drug lord” statute – due to the large-scale, ongoing narcotics trafficking conspiracy he oversaw.
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On the other hand, he engaged with law enforcement and industry in fighting crypto-crime, perhaps rationalizing his actions or hedging his bets. In the end, the strategies Lin used to operate Incognito Market were a blend of tech entrepreneurship, underworld cunning, and audacious deception. He leveraged his programming and crypto knowledge to build criminal infrastructure, used his position in a government role to appear above suspicion, and exploited the trust of thousands of users until greed – and perhaps fear – drove him to perform an exit scam on his own community. It was a breathtaking run for “Pharaoh,” but as the next section shows, law enforcement was meticulously closing in on this dark web chameleon. In May 2024, a 23-year-old Taiwanese IT specialist named Rui-Siang Lin stepped off a plane at New York’s JFK airport and was promptly arrested by federal agents. Until that moment, Lin led a double life that astonished both law enforcement and the darknet community.
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If found guilty, Lin could face a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison for participating in a continuing criminal enterprise. “After registering, customers were able to select which narcotics to purchase from which vendor and to pay for those narcotics using cryptocurrency, in transactions facilitated by a payment platform that Incognito Market described as a “bank” (the “Incognito Bank”).” The operator of Incognito revealed the scale of information at risk, including a comprehensive dump of 557,000 orders and 862,000 cryptocurrency transaction IDs. The extortion note implies that the users’ information included in this dump depends entirely on their actions.
Traceable Transactions
Incognito’s Market’s operators went a step further by making off with its users’ funds. Lin also used funds from Incognito Market’s admin wallet to purchase at least four internet domains on Namecheap. One of the transactions cost approximately $20,000, paid for using the platform’s finances.
In early 2024, vendors began reporting issues with BTC withdrawals—an ominous sign of what would become a classic darknet “exit scam.” In March, a message appeared on Incognito threatening to leak vendor identities and private messages to law enforcement unless paid in cryptocurrency. Though the platform’s administrator later claimed the extortion threat was a “joke,” the damage had been done. One of the most high-profile targets of Operation RapTor—the largest coordinated global crackdown on darknet drug trafficking to date—was Incognito Market, a dark web narcotics marketplace that operated with remarkable scale, anonymity, and apparent impunity. According to TRM Labs, Incognito launched in October 2020 and remained active until March 2024.
Tests on these tablets revealed that they were not authentic oxycodone at all but were, in fact, fentanyl pills. Lin managed to keep his darknet identity separate from his day job for years, even as he moved from Taiwan to the Caribbean for work. His colleagues and government employers presumably had no idea of his clandestine activities. For someone so young, Lin handled high-stakes operations with remarkable skill – Incognito’s growth attests to that. On one hand, he profited from a trade causing real harm (overdose deaths from fentanyl-laced pills sold on Incognito were very possible, and indeed the site dealt in those).
Law enforcement agencies knew that cracking PGP encryption directly would be a nearly impossible task. Many darknet users, particularly those who are less technically proficient, fail to follow proper encryption protocols. Some users reuse passwords, forget to encrypt certain messages, or make other basic mistakes that can leave them vulnerable. Lin knew that a single point of failure could bring down the entire operation, so he distributed the market’s servers across multiple countries, each with its own security protocols. This meant that even if one server was compromised, the rest of the network would remain intact, allowing the market to continue operating without interruption.
Designed to resemble a legitimate e-commerce platform, Incognito offered a slick user experience with branding, advertising, and customer support. 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. Incognito strives to grow by introducing our company to our customers and using the Incognito marketplace as large format specialty stores for products and services to further deepen their familiarity with them.
