An FBI ‘Asset’ Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold Fentanyl-Laced Drugs for Years

“Lin cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow opioid sales on Incognito was his own,” the lawsuit read. “And, Lin made that decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl poisonings.”

However, parts of the defense memos related to Lin's conviction refer to several specific cases when the FBI informant, while actively monitored by his law enforcement, allegedly made decisions that allowed the sale of fentanyl-tainted products – in several cases approved dealers to continue their sales even after clear warnings that their drugs contained fentanyl, Lin's defense memos.

In November 2023, for example, one Incognito user filed a complaint that one of the site's dealers had sold pills containing fentanyl that sent his mother to the hospital. “Someone almost died,” the message read. “Medical bills and the police. Not OK.” However, according to the defense memo, the informant only reversed the transaction and took no action to remove the dealer from the market.

Another Incognito user complained shortly after that the same seller had sold pills that “KILLED ME,” yet the informant allowed the dealer to stay on the market and fill more than a thousand more orders over the following months, as the defense memo describes.

Lin had programmed a system to flag certain product listings on the site as potential fentanyl sales, based on words like “powerful opioids.” Acting on the results of that surveillance system, however, was the job of the FBI informant, the defense wrote in its memo, and the informant ignored warnings on several occasions, including one for a vendor calling itself RedLightLabs. In September of 2022, RedLightLabs sold the pills to Reed Churchill that were found next to his body after his overdose. (Although the defense filing notes that the informant ignored the Incognito alert for RedLightLabs less than a week before Churchill's death, it is not clear if that decision was made before or after those pills were sold.) Two men, Michael Ta and Raj Srinivasan, plead guilty in 2023 to run the RedLightLabs account and sell pills containing fentanyl to five people who died of overdoses.

In another case, within the first months of the informant joining the site — an infiltration of its management that Lin's defense says the FBI oversaw from the beginning — the informant and Lin discussed whether to keep the market's fentanyl ban in place. Only snippets of the text exchange are included in submissions. But at one point, the informant appeared to make an argument made on a user forum for the “energy of free markets, allowing people to put what they want in their bodies,” according to a sample of their conversations cited by the defense. The prosecution countered that the informant did not advocate that position, only described it, and instead placed a “harm reduction” argument.

After the conversation, Lin responded by polling the site's users to determine if the fentanyl ban should be lifted, but then changed the results of the poll to justify keeping the ban in place. However, the prosecution's filing points to private messages from Lin saying that “the administration section is just PR and pretense anyway” as evidence that Lin never believed the fentanyl ban was effective.

A skeptical judge

At Lin's hearing, the prosecution defended the FBI's role in the investigation. Assistant US Attorney Ryan Finkel described the informant as merely a “moderator” on the site, while Lin had the more powerful role of its “administrator” – a distinction that, against Lin's defense, did not exist – and said the FBI's use of the informant was necessary to identify Lin, impeach him and permanently take down the brand. The informant knew Lin only by his market pseudonym, “Pharoah.” That meant that, while the informant could temporarily take down the market, Lin would rebuild it on another server when he was still on the loose, Finkel said.

“The government did not run Incognito. The defendant did,” Finkel told the judge. He went on to argue that the FBI had to maintain a “balance” between harm minimization and the detective work needed to arrest Lin. “This was a difficult case to solve, but they solved it.” (Lin indictment points to clues to the discovery of blockchain, the seizure of an Incognito server, and a document found in his email that proved his role in the market.)