The FBI Infiltrated a Major Dark Web Drug Market. It Ran for Two More Years, And Fentanyl Kept Selling
Earlier this month in a Manhattan courtroom, Arkansas-based physician David Churchill recounted the horrific day he found his 27-year-old son Reed, dead from a fatal fentanyl overdose. As Churchill told the court, Reed’s body was draped half across a couch and half on the floor, already “cold and dead and stiff.”
“It goes without saying that this was the worst day of my entire life,” the grieving father said, standing beside his wife as he fought back tears. “This loss has gutted us, and we carry it with us every single day.”
Churchill spoke at the sentencing hearing for Lin Rui-Siang, the convicted administrator of Incognito, a major dark web drug marketplace that moved more than $100 million in illegal narcotics before shutting down in 2024. The 25-year-old Taiwanese man received a 30-year prison sentence, one of the harshest penalties ever handed down by U.S. courts for dark web drug trafficking. The fentanyl-laced pills misrepresented as oxycodone that killed Reed— a star tennis player managing chronic pain from an injury—were just one small fraction of thousands of pounds of drugs (including MDMA, meth, cocaine, and other opioids) that Incognito helped sell during its four years of operation. “I want you to remember this face while you’re sitting in your jail cell,” Churchill told Lin directly in court.
But just minutes later, in that same hearing, Lin’s legal team dropped a bombshell that had never been revealed to the public: a third party was deeply involved in Incognito’s drug operations—including potentially the sale of the exact pills that killed Reed Churchill. That third party was the FBI.
Tainted Pills, Cleared for Sale
At the sentencing and in court filings published Thursday, Lin’s defense has pointed to an FBI confidential informant who helped run Incognito for nearly two full years, while the marketplace moved massive volumes of illicit drugs including fentanyl-tainted opioids. Identified only as an FBI “confidential human source” in court records, the informant worked as a moderator, whose official role included removing vendors who sold fentanyl (which was banned under Incognito’s own site rules). Yet the defense alleges the informant repeatedly approved sales of products explicitly flagged as likely laced with the lethal opioid.
“The reality is that Mr. Lin ran this site in partnership with someone working on behalf of the government,” Lin’s defense attorney Noam Biale told the judge at the hearing. “The government had the ability to mitigate the harm—and didn’t do it.”
In a phone interview with WIRED from jail, Lin claims the unnamed informant was a full equal partner in the site, holding an equal stake in the marketplace and all its profits. The informant, whose identity remains sealed and whom Lin declined to name, handled the vast majority of the site’s daily moderator work: resolving disputes between users and vendors, and making the final call on which sellers were allowed to operate and which got removed.
While Lin has admitted he controlled Incognito’s code and underlying technical infrastructure, he says the informant directly managed a large share of the site’s transactions. In the informant’s own communications with the FBI, the CHS claimed he oversaw “95 percent” of the site’s activity, Lin told WIRED. “They were literally running the site,” Lin said. “They were running the day-to-day operations, every aspect you would expect of an actual administrator that doesn’t have technical skills.”
In newly unredacted sentencing memos, prosecutors push back against this account, arguing the informant was Lin’s subordinate who took orders from him, not an equal partner. The memos also reject Lin’s attempt to shift blame for fentanyl deaths to the FBI. (The Department of Justice declined to comment beyond its court filings, and the FBI did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
“Lin cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow opioid sales on Incognito was his own,” the prosecution’s filing reads. “And, Lin made that decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl poisonings.”
Yet the defense’s sentencing memos point to multiple specific instances where, while the informant was actively managed by his FBI handlers, he made decisions that allowed sales of fentanyl-tainted products to go forward—even approving dealers to continue operating after clear warnings that their stock contained fentanyl. For example:
In November 2023, an Incognito user filed a complaint that a site dealer had sold fentanyl-laced pills that put his mother in the hospital. “Someone almost died,” the user’s message read. “Medical bills and the police. Not OK.” According to the defense memo, the informant only processed a refund for the transaction and took no action to remove the dealer from the platform.
Shortly after that, a second user complained that same dealer had sold him pills that “ALMOST KILLED ME.” Again, the informant let the dealer stay, and the vendor went on to fill more than 1,000 additional orders over the following months, the defense says.
Lin built an automatic system to flag product listings likely involving fentanyl, triggered by keywords like “potent opioids.” But acting on those alerts was entirely the FBI informant’s job, the defense wrote, and the informant ignored multiple alerts—including one for a vendor called RedLightLabs. In September 2022, RedLightLabs sold the pills that Reed Churchill overdosed on, which were found next to his body after his death. (While the defense notes the informant ignored the RedLightLabs alert less than a week before Churchill’s death, it remains unclear whether that decision came before or after the fatal pills were sold.) Two men who ran the RedLightLabs account, Michael Ta and Raj Srinivasan, pleaded guilty in 2023 to selling fentanyl-laced pills that killed five people, including Churchill.
Another key exchange came in the first months after the informant joined Incognito’s management—an infiltration the defense says the FBI oversaw from the very start. The pair discussed whether to keep the marketplace’s existing ban on fentanyl sales. Only snippets of their chat have been released in court filings, but according to the defense, the informant at one point cited a user forum argument for “the energy of free markets, allowing people to put whatever they want in their bodies.” Prosecutors counter that the informant wasn’t endorsing that view, only summarizing it, and actually argued for harm reduction by keeping the ban.
After the conversation, Lin created a user poll to decide whether to lift the ban, but then rigged the poll results to keep the ban in place. Prosecutors point to a private message from Lin that read “the governance section is just PR and pretense anyway” as evidence Lin never truly believed the fentanyl ban was necessary or effective.
A Skeptical Judge
At the sentencing hearing, prosecutors defended the FBI’s handling of the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Finkel argued the informant was only a “moderator” on the site, while Lin held the far more powerful role of “administrator”—a distinction the defense dismissed as meaningless. Finkel said using the informant was the only way to identify Lin, secure an indictment, and take Incognito down permanently. The informant only knew Lin by his site pseudonym “Pharoah,” meaning even if the informant took the site offline temporarily, Lin could have just rebuilt it on a new server if he remained at large, Finkel explained.
“The government didn't run Incognito. The defendant did,” Finkel told the judge. He went on to argue that the FBI had to strike a careful “balance” between minimizing public harm and doing the detective work needed to apprehend Lin. “This was a difficult case to solve, but they solved it.” (Lin’s indictment cites blockchain-tracing evidence, the seizure of an Incognito server, and a document found in his email that confirmed his leading role in the marketplace.)
Presiding judge Colleen McMahon did not fully accept the prosecution’s arguments. “I’m somewhat skeptical that the government, having infiltrated this operation, had to let it go on for as long as it did,” she said in the hearing.
McMahon also rejected the prosecution’s attempt to distinguish between the informant’s title of “moderator” and Lin’s title of “administrator.” “I don't care what his title was,” she said. “He was an FBI asset.”
Even so, when handing down the 30-year sentence, McMahon ruled that the revelations about the FBI’s role did not reduce Lin’s own culpability for the harm Incognito caused. “The enormity of what you did outweighs any argument they could make, including the argument the government was complicit in this,” McMahon told Lin, adding that “the government is not on trial here.”
Earlier this week, Lin’s defense filed an appeal in the case, making a separate argument unrelated to the FBI informant: Lin claims he has diplomatic immunity as an employee of the Taiwanese consulate in St. Lucia. Ironically, his duties at the consulate included training local law enforcement to combat cryptocurrency-related crime.
For David Churchill, the grieving father, the sentencing hearing was the first time he ever heard about the FBI informant’s role in Incognito’s drug sales—including the sale of the fentanyl-tainted pills that killed his son. But he says he feels “no ill will or animosity” toward the FBI over the new details.
“I don't want to throw the FBI under the bus. It won't bring Reed back,” Churchill says. “But maybe next time, they could be a little bit more aggressive in shutting things down as soon as they understand what's going on.”
Biale, Lin’s lead attorney, points out that the core question is not simply why the FBI didn’t shut Incognito down earlier, but why its informant didn’t act to remove fentanyl listings from the site while the investigation unfolded. That, he says, is a question the government has yet to answer.
“The informant could have just done the job he was hired to do, which was, in part, to keep fentanyl off the site,” Biale says. “That would not have blown the cover of the FBI. And it could have saved lives.”
