An FBI ‘Asset’ Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold Fentanyl-Laced Drugs for Years

A staffer of the Incognito dark web market was secretly controlled by the FBI—and still allegedly approved the sale of fentanyl-tainted pills, including those from a dealer linked to a confirmed death.

Andy Greenberg

Security
Feb 19, 2026 6:18 PM

An FBI ‘Asset’ Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold Fentanyl-Laced Drugs for Years

A staffer of the Incognito dark web market was secretly controlled by the FBI—and still allegedly approved the sale of fentanyl-tainted pills, including those from a dealer linked to a confirmed death.

[An FBI ‘Asset Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold FentanylLaced Drugs for Years]

Photograph: Salwan Georges/Getty Images

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

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