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He Trained Cops to Fight Crypto Crime—and Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark-Web Drug Market
The strange journey of Lin Rui-siang, the 23-year-old accused of running the Incognito black market, extorting his own site's users—and then refashioning himself as a legit crypto crime expert.
Two months ago, Lin Rui-siang, a young Taiwanese man wearing black-rimmed glasses and a white polo shirt, stood behind a lectern emblazoned with the crest of the St. Lucia police, giving a presentation titled “Cyber Crime and Cryptocurrency” in nearly fluent English to a roomful of cops from the tiny Caribbean country. It required that new users demonstrate they could use the encryption tool PGP before entering the market, prompted them to take a security quiz, allowed buyers to spend the more privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero as well as Bitcoin, encouraged dealers to post results from a fentanyl test to certify their product was “fent free,” and even experimented with democratic voting for market-wide decisions. If Lin did hope to evade law enforcement by becoming an expert in crypto tracing himself, he was far too late to avoid creating his own blockchain trail of evidence: In January of this year, the FBI says it somehow identified a central Incognito server and obtained a search warrant for its contents.
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