Catherine Rusoff
A 23-year-old man from Taiwan has been arrested on charges of selling at least $100 million worth of illegal drugs online through a dark web site known as “Mercado Incógnito.”
Rui-Siang Lin, also known as “Pharaoh,” was arrested at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on Saturday and was scheduled to appear in court on Monday, the Justice Department saidcalling it “one of the largest illegal narcotics markets on the Internet.”
“As alleged, Rui-Siang Lin was the architect of Incognito, a $100 million dark web scheme to traffic deadly drugs into the United States and around the world,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Incognito Market, which closed in March, was an online dark web marketplace that allowed users to buy and sell illegal drugs anonymously, according to the Department of Justice.
Hundreds of kilos of cocaine, methamphetamines and other medicines have been sold on Mercado Incognito since its launch in October 2020, it said.
“Under the promise of anonymity, Lin’s alleged operation offered to purchase lethal drugs and fraudulent prescription medications on a global scale,” said James Smith, assistant director of the FBI’s New York office.
Incognito Market users were able to search thousands of listings for illegal narcotics, including heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, oxycodone, methamphetamine, ketamine, and alprazolam.
Incognito Market included “many features of legitimate e-commerce sites, such as branding, advertising, and customer service,” the Justice Department said. The accusation includes several images of the site, including its homepage.
Department of Justice
The sellers paid five percent of the purchase price of each sale to “Mercado Incognito,” providing Lin with millions of dollars in profits, the Justice Department said.
Lin could face life in prison if convicted of narcotics conspiracy.
Taipei Foreign Ministry spokesman Jeff Liu said during a regular briefing on Tuesday that Lin had worked since November at Taiwan’s embassy in Saint Lucia, an eastern Caribbean nation that is one of Taiwan’s few allies. Asian island.
He applied to work as part of the embassy’s technical staff instead of military service – mandatory for Taiwanese men – and “behaved normally”.
Expected to be discharged in July, Lin requested leave and left Saint Lucia on May 18, Liu said.
He “was scheduled to go to Singapore via New York when he was arrested by police in New York,” he said, adding that Taiwan was closely monitoring the case.
“This arrest underscores law enforcement’s dedicated and ongoing efforts to identify and dismantle illicit drug networks operating in every dark corner of the market,” NYPD Commissioner Edward A. Caban said in a statement.
