Rui-Siang Lin, a 24-year-old Taiwanese national who operated under the pseudonym "Pharaoh," was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on February 3, 2026, for running Incognito Market, one of the largest dark web narcotics marketplaces ever created.
The platform, which operated from October 2020 until its closure in March 2024, facilitated over 640,000 drug transactions totaling more than $105 million in sales. Its inventory included over 1,000 kilograms each of cocaine and methamphetamine, along with hundreds of kilograms of other narcotics and fentanyl-laced pills disguised as oxycodone.
The marketplace served more than 400,000 buyer accounts and hosted over 1,800 vendors, while Lin personally collected more than $6 million in profits.
Lin oversaw every aspect of Incognito Market's operations from various locations including St. Lucia, where he ironically conducted a training session for local police on cybercrime and cryptocurrency. The platform functioned like a professional e-commerce site, complete with branding, customer service, and its own internal cryptocurrency bank that kept buyers and sellers anonymous.
In January 2022, Lin introduced a policy explicitly allowing opiate sales on the site, which led to the sale of counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl. directly contributing to the death of a 27-year-old man from Arkansas in September 2022.
When Lin shut down the marketplace in March 2024, he stole at least $1 million in user deposits and attempted to extort vendors and buyers by threatening to publish their transaction histories.
The sentencing judge called it the most serious drug crime she had encountered in 27.5 years on the bench. Lin was also ordered to forfeit over $105 million and serve five years of supervised release.
