Markets
He trained cops to fight crypto crime and allegedly ran a $100 million dark web drug market
The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing its former users: It had archived messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would create a “whitelist portal” where users could pay a fee, which for some retailers would later be set at up to $20,000, to remove the own data before all the incriminating information was leaked online later this month. “YES, THIS IS EXTORTION!!!” the message added.
In retrospect, Ormsby says the site’s apparent ease of use and security features were perhaps a multi-year scam laying the groundwork for his end game, a kind of user extortion never before seen in drug markets in the dark web. “Maybe the whole thing was set up to create a false sense of security,” Ormsby says. “The extortion thing is completely new to me. But if you’ve tricked people into having a sense of security, I guess it’s easier to extort them.”
In total, Incognito Market promised to leak more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers didn’t pay to have them removed from the data dump. It is not yet clear whether the market administrator – Lin, according to the prosecution, accused of having personally conducted the extortion campaign – had the intention of following through on the threat: it seems that he was arrested before the deadline set for the victims of the ‘Incognito. blackmail.
An expert in ‘Anti-Money Laundering’
At the same time that the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double game, he also appears to have briefly tried to engineer an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market’s relatively quiet first year, Lin’s alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and allow users to check, for a fee, whether their cryptocurrency could be linked to criminal transactions.
In a post on the dark web marketplace forum Dread, Pharoah clarified that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money laundering investigators, but rather those seeking to evade them, presumably including users of its own dark web marketplace. “Our goals are not to aid the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies,” Pharoah’s post reads. “This service is dedicated to people who need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the adversary’s point of view so that the user can understand the possibility of his funds being marked with autocratic illegal charges. “
After independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs wrote about the Antianalysis service in August 2021, describing it as an “anti-money laundering service for scammers,” Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as the AMLBot anti-money laundering tool, and that would have gone offline. “Stay updated and fuck LE,” Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” Eventually, however, Antinalysis returned and last year switched to instead acting as a service for exchanging bitcoin for monero and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracking and blockchain analysis: his latest post on LinkedIn last week before his arrest in New York he announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracing tool sold by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. “I am excited to share that I have completed Chainalysis’s new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)!” Lin wrote in Mandarin. His last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.