In a Manhattan courtroom earlier this month, Arkansas doctor David Churchill described the day he found the body of his 27-year-old son, Reed, after a fatal dose of fentanyl: half on the couch, half on the floor, “cold and dead and stiff,” as Churchill told the court.
“As you might imagine, it was the worst day of my life,” the father said, standing beside his wife and suppressing tears. “We've been gutted by this, and we have to live with it every day.”
Churchill was speaking at the sentencing hearing for Lin Rui-Siang, a convicted administrator of the dark web drug market Incognito, which sold more than $100 million in narcotics before it ceased operation in 2024. During the hearing, the 25-year-old Taiwanese man would be sentenced to 30 years in prison, one of the longest sentences ever handed down in the US for the sale of drugs on the dark web. The fentanyl-laced pills marketed as oxycodone that killed Churchill's son, a star tennis player dealing with pain from an injury, were among the thousands of pounds of illegal drugs, including MDMA, meth, cocaine, and opioids, whose sale Incognito facilitated in its nearly four years online. “I want you to remember this face when you’re sitting in a jail cell,” Churchill said, addressing Lin in court.
Just minutes later, however, in that same sentencing hearing, Lin's defense would publicly reveal for the first time that another party had a role in Incognito's drug deals—and perhaps even in the sale of the exact pills that would kill Reed Churchill: the FBI.
At Lin's sentencing and in court filings published on Thursday, his defense has pointed to an FBI informant who helped run Incognito's marketplace for almost two years as it sold vast amounts of narcotics, including some fentanyl-laced opioids. The individual, referred to as an FBI “confidential human source” in the filings, acted as a moderator with the power to remove vendors from Incognito who sold fentanyl—which was banned under the market's rules—yet at times allegedly approved the sale of products flagged as potentially tainted with that lethally powerful opioid.
“The reality is that Mr. Lin ran this site in partnership with someone working at the behest of the government,” Lin's defense attorney, Noam Biale, told the judge at the sentencing hearing. “The government had the ability to mitigate the harm—and didn’t do it.”
Tainted Pills, Cleared for Sale
On a call with WIRED placed from jail, Lin himself claimed that the unnamed informant was a full partner in the site and held an equal stake in the market and its profits. Lin alleges that the informant, whose name has not been revealed and whom Lin declined to identify, carried out the vast majority of the moderator functions on the site, settling disputes and making decisions about which vendors would be allowed to sell drugs and which would be removed.
While Lin has admitted to controlling the code and technical infrastructure of Incognito, he claims that the informant directly managed a significant portion of the site's deals. In records of the informant's communications with the FBI, the informant said they oversaw “95 percent” of the site's transactions. “They were literally running the site,” Lin told WIRED. “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 in Lin's case, the prosecution counters that the informant was working as Lin's subordinate and took orders from him rather than acting as his equal partner. The memo also attacks Lin's attempt to put blame on the FBI for the fentanyl sales. (The Department of Justice declined to comment beyond its filings in the case, and the FBI didn't 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 portions of the defense's memos related to Lin's sentencing point to several specific instances when the FBI informant, while actively controlled by his law enforcement handlers, allegedly made decisions that allowed sales of fentanyl-tainted products—in several cases approving dealers to continue their sales even after clear warnings that their drugs contained fentanyl, Lin's defense memo says.
In November of 2023, for instance, one Incognito user lodged 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.” Yet according to the defense's memo, the informant merely refunded the transaction and took no action to remove the dealer from the market.
Another Incognito user soon after complained that the same vendor had sold pills that “ALMOST KILLED ME,” yet the informant again allowed the dealer to stay on the market and carry out more than a thousand more orders over the following months, as the defense memo describes it.
Lin had programmed a system to flag certain product listings on the site as potential fentanyl sales, based on words such as “potent opioids.” Acting on the results of that monitoring system, however, was the job of the FBI informant, the defense wrote in its memo, and the informant disregarded alerts on several occasions, including one for a vendor that called itself RedLightLabs. In September of 2022, RedLightLabs sold the pills to Reed Churchill that were found next to his body after his overdose. (Though the defense's filing notes that the informant disregarded the Incognito alert for RedLightLabs less than a week before Churchill's death, it's not clear if that decision was made before or after those pills were sold.) Two men, Michael Ta and Raj Srinivasan, pleaded guilty in 2023 to running the RedLightLabs account and selling fentanyl-laced pills to five people who died of overdoses.
In another instance, 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 have been included in filings. But at one point the informant seems to raise an argument made on a user forum for the “energy of free markets, allowing people to put whatever they want in their bodies,” according to a sample of their chats quoted by the defense. The prosecution countered that the informant wasn't advocating for that position, only describing it, and instead made an argument for “harm reduction.”
After the conversation, Lin responded by creating a poll of the site's users to determine if the fentanyl ban should be lifted, but then rigged the poll's results to justify the ban staying in place. The prosecution's filing, however, points to private messages from Lin stating that “the governance section is just PR and pretense anyway” as evidence that Lin never actually believed the fentanyl ban was effective.
A Skeptical Judge
At Lin's sentencing 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 held the more powerful role as its “administrator”—a distinction that, Lin's defense countered, didn't exist—and said that the FBI's use of the informant was necessary to identify Lin, indict him, and permanently take down the market. The informant knew Lin only by his pseudonym on the market, “Pharoah.” That meant that, while the informant might have been able to take the market down temporarily, Lin would have been able to rebuild it on a different server if he were still at large, Finkel argued.
“The government didn't 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 necessary to apprehend Lin. “This was a difficult case to solve, but they solved it.” (Lin's indictment points to blockchain-tracing clues, the seizure of an Incognito server, and a document found in his email that proved his role in the market.)
The judge presiding over the case, Colleen McMahon, didn't entirely accept those arguments from the prosecution. “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 dismissed any distinction between whether the informant was a “moderator” or an "administrator" of Incognito. “I don't care what his title was,” she said. “He was an FBI asset.”
In sentencing Lin to 30 years in prison, however, McMahon said that nothing his defense attorneys had highlighted about the FBI's role in the Incognito case changed Lin's own culpability. “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.”
Lin's defense filed for an appeal in his case earlier this week, making an argument unrelated to the FBI informant: that Lin had diplomatic immunity as an employee of the Taiwanese consulate in St. Lucia. (His duties at the consulate included, ironically, training law enforcement in combatting cryptocurrency-related crime.)
As for David Churchill, the grieving father told WIRED in a phone call that the sentencing hearing was the first he'd heard of the FBI informant's role in Incognito's drug sales—including the sales of fentanyl-tainted pills to his son. But he felt “no ill will or animosity” toward the FBI about the new facts in the case.
“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."
Lin's lead defense attorney Noam Biale points out, however, that the question isn't simply why the FBI didn't act to shut down Incognito earlier, but why its informant didn't act in the meantime to remove fentanyl listings from the market. 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.”
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