Federal authorities have arrested a 23-year-old Taiwanese national and charged him with operating an online marketplace that sold $100 million worth of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, LSD, and ketamine.
Authorities say Rui Xian Lin operated and owned Secret Market, an online marketplace on the dark web that users from all over the world visit to buy and sell illegal drugs, for about four years, authorities said. Marketplaces facilitated transactions using many of the same features that legitimate e-commerce sites offer, such as buyer and user registration, branding, advertising, and customer service. When a registered purchaser accesses the site using her Tor browser, she sees the following image.
The site allowed buyers to search for their drug of choice from thousands of listings. KrebsOnSecurity reported that the service was launched in October 2020 and offers both buyers and sellers between $100 and $2,000 in exchange for operators not publishing text messages or transaction records indicating their participation in the market. It was shut down in March last year after extorting US dollar fees. Incognito facilitated the sale of more than $100 million in drugs in his 41 months that his market was open. By June 2023, the site was generating $5 million in monthly sales.
Using multiple spellings of online handles, including Pharaoh, “Lin has over 1,000 vendors (those who sell drugs on the secret market), over 200,000 customers (those who buy drugs on the secret market); “He ultimately controlled at least one” other employee who assisted Lin in managing the site,” prosecutors alleged in the indictment unsealed Monday.
To facilitate the market, the site has created its own bank that allows users to deposit cryptocurrencies into their accounts.
Once a trade is made, funds are transferred from the buyer's account to the seller's account, less a 5% fee collected by Secret Market. This arrangement allowed buyers and sellers to remain anonymous to each other. The site also made money by charging sellers an initial admission fee.
Over the course of Incognito's history, Incognito has generated $83.6 million in sales, and Mr. Lin and his associates have earned about $4.2 million in fees and admissions. Prosecutors say Lin collected millions of dollars in profits.
“For about four years, Rui Xian Ling operated Incognito Market, one of the largest online platforms for drug sales, conducting illegal drug transactions worth $100 million and making millions of dollars worth of personal James Smith, deputy director of the FBI's New York field office, said in a statement. “Lin's alleged operation offered the purchase of deadly drugs and counterfeit prescription drugs on a global scale, with the promise of anonymity.”
The substances available included narcotics and counterfeit prescription drugs, including heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, oxycodone, methamphetamine, ketamine, and alprazolam. In the indictment, federal prosecutors included the following screenshot as an example of products available on Incognito Market.
“The listings included prescription drugs that were advertised as authentic but were not,” federal officials said. “For example, in November 2023, undercover agents received several pills purporting to be Oxycodone that had been purchased from the Incognito Market. Upon testing these pills, we found that they were not genuine Oxycodone at all and were in fact It turned out to be a fentanyl pill.”
Lin was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport on Saturday and was scheduled to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Monday afternoon. It is unclear whether Lin has filed a petition.
If convicted, Lin faces a minimum life sentence for continuing criminal conduct, a maximum life sentence for the drug conspiracy count, a maximum 20 years in prison for money laundering, and a maximum five years in prison for conspiracy to sell adulterated and misbranded drugs.