A New York court yesterday sentenced a Taiwanese man to 30 years in prison for conspiring to distribute narcotics, money laundering and conspiring to sell adulterated and misbranded medication.
Taiwanese national Lin Rui-siang (林睿庠) was arrested in May 2024 for operating an online narcotics marketplace, called “Incognito Market,” the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton said in a news release yesterday.
Before Lin’s platform was shut down in March 2024, he had sold more than about 1 tonne of drugs on underground markets, Clayton said.
Photo courtesy of the US Department of Justice’s Office of Public Affairs
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, the attorney 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 the Incognito Market under the online pseudonym “Pharaoh,” supervised its operations and “had ultimate decision-making 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, the Incognito Market 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.
Lin, who specialized in information technology, 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 said previously.
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.
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