Markets
He trained police officers to fight crypto crime and allegedly ran a $100 million drug market on the Dark Web
The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmail former users: It stored their messages and transaction records, he said, and added that it would create a “whitelist portal” where users could pay fees – which for some dealers would later reach 20,000 $ – to delete their data before any incriminating information was leaked online at the end of this month. “YES IT’S EXTORTION!!!” » the message added.
In retrospect, Ormsby says the site’s apparent user-friendliness and security features may have been a years-long effort that laid the groundwork for its final phase, a kind of user extortion never before seen in online marketplaces. the drug of the dark web. “Maybe this was all set up to create a false sense of security,” Ormsby says. “The extortion thing is completely new to me. But if you’ve reassured people, I imagine it’s easier to extort them.”
In total, Incognito Market promised to release more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers did not pay to have them removed from the data dump. It remains unclear whether the market administrator – Lin, prosecutors say, who they accuse of personally leading the extortion campaign – planned to follow through on his threat: he appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for the victims of Incognito. blackmail.
An expert in “fighting money laundering”
At the same time that the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried to hatch an entirely different plan. In the summer of 2021, during the relatively quiet first year of the Incognito market, Lin’s alleged alter ego Pharoah launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and allow users to verify, for a fee, if their cryptocurrency could be linked to criminal activity. transactions.
In a post on dark web marketplace forum Dread, Pharoah made clear that Antinalysis was not designed 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 message read. “This service is dedicated to people who need complete privacy on the blockchain, providing a perspective from the adversary’s point of view so that the user understands the possibility of their funds being flagged under illegal autocratic accusations. »
According to independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service In August 2021, describing it as an “anti-money laundering service for scammers,” Pharoah posted another post complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as l anti-money laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would be offline. “Stay informed and fuck LE,” Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” However, Antinalysis eventually came back and pivoted last year to act more as a service to exchange bitcoin for monero and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracing and blockchain analysis: his final publication 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 analysis firm Chainalysis. “I am delighted to announce that I have obtained the new qualification from Chainalysis: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)! » Lin wrote in Mandarin. Her last message shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.