“Lin cannot seriously deny that the decision to allow the sale of opioids on Incognito was his own decision,” the indictments read. “Lin made this decision knowing full well that encouraging the use of opioids was tantamount to condoning fentanyl poisoning.”
However, portions of Lin’s sentencing defense memos point to several specific instances in which an FBI informant, actively monitored by his law enforcement officers, allegedly made decisions that permitted the sale of fentanyl-containing products – in several cases allowing dealers to continue selling even after being clearly warned that their drugs contained fentanyl, Lin’s defense memo said.
For example, in November 2023, an Incognito user filed a complaint that one of the site’s sellers sold pills laced with fentanyl, sending his mother to the hospital. “Someone almost died,” the message read. “Medical bills and the police. Not okay.” However, according to the defense memo, the whistleblower merely refunded the transaction amount and took no action to remove the dealer from the market.
Another Incognito user shortly thereafter complained that the same seller sold pills that “ALMOST KILLED ME,” yet the whistleblower again allowed the seller to remain in business and fulfill over a thousand more orders in the following months, as described in the defense memo.
Lin programmed a system that flagged certain product information on the website as potential fentanyl sales based on words such as “strong opioids.” But the defense wrote in its memo that it was the FBI informant’s responsibility to act on the results of that monitoring system, and the informant had disregarded warnings several times, including one about a supplier called RedLightLabs. In September 2022, RedLightLabs sold Reed Churchill pills that were found next to his body after an overdose. (Although the defense filing notes that the informant disregarded an incognito alert to RedLightLabs less than a week before Churchill’s death, it is unclear whether this decision was made before or after the sale of these pills.) Two men, Michael Ta and Raj Srinivasan, pleaded guilty in 2023 for running the RedLightLabs account and selling fentanyl pills to five people who died of overdoses.
In another case, in the first months after the informant joined the facility – infiltrating the management of a company that Lin’s defense claims the FBI had been overseeing from the beginning – the informant and Lin debated whether to maintain a ban on fentanyl on the market. Only excerpts from text exchanges were included in the submissions. At one point, however, the informant appears to raise an argument made on a user forum for “free market energy, allowing people to put whatever they like into their bodies,” according to a sample of their conversations cited by the defense. The prosecutor’s office responded that the whistleblower was not advocating such a position, but merely describing it, and instead made an argument for “harm reduction”.
After the conversation, Lin responded by creating a survey of the site’s users to determine whether the fentanyl ban should be lifted, but then falsified the survey results to justify maintaining the ban. However, the indictments include private messages from Lin stating that “the management part is just PR and appearances anyway,” evidence that Lin never really believed the fentanyl ban was effective.
Skeptical judge
During Lin’s sentencing hearing, prosecutors defended the FBI’s role in the investigation. Assistant U.S. attorney Ryan Finkel described the informant merely as a “moderator” of the site, while Lin had a more critical role as an “administrator” – a distinction that Lin’s defense denied existed – and said the FBI’s utilize of the informant was necessary to identify Lin, indict him and permanently destroy the market. The informant knew Linu in the market only by his nickname “Pharaoh”. This meant that while the whistleblower could temporarily block the marketplace, Lin would be able to rebuild it on a different server if he was still at enormous, Finkel argued.
“The government did not run Incognito. The defendant did,” Finkel told the judge. He went on to argue that the FBI must strike a “balance” between harm minimization and the detective work necessary to apprehend Lin. “It was a difficult case to solve, but we managed to solve it.” (Lin’s indictment points to blockchain tracking tips, the seizure of an Incognito server and a document found in his email that confirms his role in the market.)