Online, he was better known as “Pharoah.” Rui-Siang Lin, a 23-year-old Taiwanese man, was arrested at JFK Airport in New York on Saturday. “Rui-Siang Lin is accused of being the architect of Incognito, a dark web project valued at $100 million aimed at trafficking lethal drugs into the United States and around the world,” declared the Minister of Justice, Merrick Garland in a press release. He now faces life imprisonment.
In total, hundreds of kilos of cocaine, methamphetamines, and other drugs have been sold on Incognito Market since its launch in October 2020. Considered by the US department as “sophisticated and dangerous”, the site allowed like any other site of e-commerce to connect – under cover of anonymity – customers and sellers to fill a basket made up of various drugs. And all this without any prescription needed.
In return, Incognito Market took a 5% commission on each sale “generating millions of dollars in profits for Rui-Siang Lin,” according to the US Department of Justice. Nearly $100 million in four years.
“Exit scam” and extortion
To ensure this transaction, Incognito Market created its own bank using cryptocurrencies. However, at the beginning of March, users noticed that they were no longer able to withdraw their money from the site, as alerted by the Dark Web Informer account, a whistleblower specializing in the sector. An information confirmed by the Coin Telegraph website who feared an “exit scam”. Would “Pharoah” have wanted to get away with the money? He assured him in a message posted on Reddit that the bug was only due to changes to the site.
An implausible justification for the attempted extortion of its users two weeks later. Under penalty of a ransom, Incognito Market threatened to disclose their personal information and order history to the police if they left, the report said. then the Big Data site. “You thought you were done with us? We have one last little unpleasant surprise for you all. We have accumulated a list of private messages, transaction info and order details over the years,” the administrator wrote. Enough to suggest that online, anonymity is never possible even for the most mafia-like networks.