A New York court on Tuesday sentenced a Taiwanese man to 30 years in prison for conspiring to distribute narcotics, money laundering, and conspiring to sell adulterated and misbranded medication.
Lin Rui-siang (林睿庠) was arrested in May 2024 for operating an online narcotics marketplace, called “Incognito Market,” US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton said in a statement on Tuesday.
Before Lin’s platform was shut down in March 2024, he had sold more than 1 tonne of drugs on underground markets, Clayton said.
Photo: Screen grab from the Investigation Bureau’s Web site
Lin pled guilty to the crimes on Dec. 16, 2024, before US District Judge Colleen McMahon, who requested a heavy sentence.
While Lin was in the US, he sold US$105 million worth of drugs to online customers, making him “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers,” Clayton said.
Lin made millions of US dollars in profits, caused at least one death and exacerbated the opioid crisis, he said.
Lin’s sentence sends a clear message to drug traffickers that “the Internet, ‘decentralization,’ ‘blockchain’ — any technology — is not a license to operate a narcotics distribution business,” he said.
Lin operated Incognito Market under the online pseudonym “Pharaoh,” supervised its operations and “had ultimate decisionmaking authority over every aspect of the multimillion-dollar operation,” the court said in its statement.
Lin was a founding member of the market in October 2020 and led the site from January 2022 until he closed it in March 2024, the court said.
He ran the site while based in Saint Lucia and even led a four-day training for Saint Lucian police officers about online crime and cryptocurrency, which he wrote about on his personal Facebook page, it said.
Under Lin’s leadership, Incognito Market’s customer base grew to more than 400,000 people, who were served by more than 1,800 narcotics “vendors,” facilitating more than 640,000 narcotics transactions, it said.
An information technology specialist, Lin was dispatched to Saint Lucia in November 2023 under Taiwan’s substitute military service program, which allows conscripts to fulfill their national service obligations by assisting with Taiwan’s overseas missions, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office opened a separate investigation into alleged money laundering by Lin, seizing real estate and bank savings in Taiwan totaling more than NT$200 million (US$6.33 million) in May last year.
SILENCING CRITICS: In addition to blocking Taiwan, China aimed to prevent rights activists from speaking out against authoritarian states, a Cabinet department said The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday condemned transnational repression by Beijing after RightsCon, a major digital human rights conference scheduled to be held in Zambia this week, was abruptly canceled due to Chinese pressure over Taiwanese participation. This year’s RightsCon, the world’s largest conference discussing issues “at the intersection of human rights and technology,” was scheduled to take place from tomorrow to Friday in Lusaka, and expected to draw 2,600 in-person attendees from 150 countries, along with 1,100 online participants. However, organizers were forced to cancel the event due to behind-the-scenes pressure from China, the ministry said, expressing its “strongest condemnation”
Taiwan’s economy grew far faster than expected in the first quarter, as booming demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications drove a surge in exports, spilling over into investment and consumption, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. GDP growth was 13.69 percent year-on-year during the January-to-March period, beating the DGBAS’ February forecast by 2.23 percentage points and marking the most robust growth in nearly four decades, DGBAS senior official Chiang Hsin-yi (江心怡) told a news conference in Taipei. The result was powered by exports, which remain the backbone of Taiwan’s economy, Chiang said. Outbound shipments jumped 51.12 percent year-on-year to
DELAYED BUT DETERMINED: The president’s visit highlights Taiwan’s right to international engagement amid regional pressure from China President Willaim Lai (賴清德) yesterday arrived in Eswatini, more than a week after his planned visit to Taiwan’s sole African ally was suspended because of revoked overflight permits. “The visit, originally scheduled for April 22, was postponed due to unforeseen external factors,” Lai wrote on social media. “After several days of careful arrangements by our diplomatic and national security teams, we successfully arrived today.” Lai said he looked forward to further deepening Taiwan-Eswatini relations through closer cooperation in the economy, agriculture, culture and education, as well as advancing the nation’s international partnerships. The president was initially scheduled to arrive in time to celebrate
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) yesterday said the US faced a choice between an “impossible” military operation or a “bad deal” with Tehran, after US President Donald Trump disparaged Iran’s latest peace proposal. Negotiations between the two countries have been deadlocked since a ceasefire came into effect on April 8, with only one round of direct peace talks held so far. Iran’s Tasnim and Fars news agencies reported that Tehran had submitted a 14-point proposal to mediator Pakistan, but Trump was quick to cast doubt on it. “I will soon be reviewing the plan that Iran has just sent to us, but
RSS