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.)