US EditionIncognito Market founder Rui-Siang Lin sentenced to 30 years in crypto darknet drug marketplace case
Lin facilitated over 640,000 transactions and moved more than one tonne of narcotics worldwide, resulting in a $105 million forfeiture and five years supervised release.
- On Feb. 3, Rui‑Siang Lin, a 24‑year‑old national, was sentenced in New York to 30 years for running Incognito Market, prosecutors said.
- Records filed by prosecutors indicate Incognito processed more than 640,000 transactions and sold over one tonne of illegal drugs during its nearly four-year run.
- Lin co-founded Incognito Market in October 2020, took over leadership in January 2022, registered more than 400,000 user accounts, coordinated over 1,800 vendors and was arrested on May 19, 2024.
- The court ordered Lin to forfeit $105 million and imposed five years of supervised release, with the U.S. Attorney's Office calling it one of the largest online drug market prosecutions since Silk Road.
- While posted to St. Lucia, Lin trained St. Lucian police on cybercrime, but prosecutors said his offenses contributed to at least one death and harmed more than 470,000 narcotics users and their families.
12 Articles
12 Articles
Taiwan man gets 30-year term in U.S. for running online drug market
A Taiwanese diplomatic service conscript who ran a multimillion-dollar online drug marketplace while training St. Lucian police on cybersecurity and cryptocurrency crime was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a U.S. court Tuesday.
Incognito Market founder Rui-Siang Lin sentenced to 30 years in crypto darknet drug marketplace case
U.S. prosecutors say the Taiwanese operator of the $105 Million Incognito Market used cryptocurrency and anonymity tools before investigators tied him to the platform through domain records and digital traces.
A U.S. federal court sentenced Rui-Siang Lin, 24, to 30 years in prison for his role as administrator of Incognito Market, a darknet narcotics market that operated between 2020 and 2024. The sentence included the confiscation of $105,045,109, an amount linked to more than 640,000 illicit transactions. The investigation, run by the Southern District of New York, identified Lin from administrative records. The platform’s backend domains and servic…
Dark Web Drug Kingpin Sentenced to 30 Years as Global Crypto Crime Crackdown Expands
Key Takeaways Rui-Siang Lin was sentenced to 30 years for running Incognito Market, a dark web drug marketplace that processed over $105 million in sales. The platform used crypto-based payment systems to hide transactions and distributed fentanyl-laced counterfeit opioids. Authorities are stepping up global regulation and enforcement, including major asset seizures and tighter crypto oversight to curb illicit activity. Lin operated the platfor…
How a Single Administrative Error Brought Down a Crypto Drug Network More Stories ETHNews
The decisive flaw in Incognito Market was not its payment system or its scale, but a single administrative decision made outside the blockchain. That vulnerability became explicit on February 3, 2026, when a 30-year prison sentence formalized how the platform unraveled long before its operators realized it. The judgment against Rui-Siang Lin, the 24-year-old administrator of Incognito Market, marks one of the clearest examples of how darknet inf…
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