Markets
He Trained Cops to Fight Crypto Crimes — and Allegedly Ran a $100 Million Dark Web Drug Market
The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing your former users: It had stored their messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would create a “whitelist portal” where users could pay a fee – which for some dealers would later be set at $20,000 – to remove their data before all the incriminating information was leaked online later this month. “YES, THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!” the added message.
In retrospect, Ormsby says the site’s apparent ease of use and security features were perhaps a years-long fraud that laid the groundwork for its demise, a kind of user extortion never seen before in dark drug markets. web. “Maybe it was all designed to create a false sense of security,” says Ormsby. “The extortion thing is completely new to me. But if you’ve lulled people into a sense of security, I think it’s easier to extort.”
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 remains unclear whether the market administrator – Lin, according to prosecutors, whom they accuse of personally carrying out the extortion campaign – planned to carry out the threat: he appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for victims of Incognito blackmail.
An ‘Anti-Money Laundering’ Expert
While the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this betrayal, he also appears to have briefly attempted to devise an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market’s relatively quiet first year, Lin’s supposed alter ego Pharoah launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and allow users to verify – for a fee – whether your cryptocurrency could be connected to criminals. transactions.
In a post on the dark web marketplace forum Dread, Pharoah made it clear that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money laundering investigators, but rather those who tried to prevent it – presumably including users of his own marketplace in dark web. “Our goals do not lie in aiding the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies,” Pharoah’s post read. “This service is dedicated to individuals who need complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent’s point of view so that the user understands the possibility of their funds being flagged under autocratic illegal charges. ”
After independent cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service In August 2021, describing it as an “anti-money laundering service for criminals,” Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs identified as the anti-money laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would remain offline. “Stay informed and fuck LE,” Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” Antinalysis eventually returned, however, and last year began 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 final post on LinkedIn Last week, before his arrest in New York, he announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracking tool sold by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. “I’m excited to share that I’ve completed Chainalysis’ new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)!” Lin wrote in Mandarin. From him last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.