FBI “assets” helped operate a dark website that sold fentanyl-laced drugs for years

“Lynn cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow the sale of opioids on Incognito was his,” the prosecution filing said. “Lane made this decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl poisoning.”

However, portions of defense memos related to Lane’s sentencing cite several specific instances when an FBI informant, while under the control of law enforcement officials, allegedly made decisions that allowed the sale of fentanyl-tainted products — and in several cases dealers agreed to continue their sales even after clear warnings that their medications contained fentanyl, Lane’s defense memo said.

In November of 2023, for example, an Incognito user filed a complaint that one of the site’s merchants sold pills containing fentanyl that sent his mother to the hospital. “Someone almost died,” the message read. “Medical bills and the police. It’s not okay.” However, according to the defense memorandum, the informant only returned the transaction funds and took no action to remove the trader from the market.

Another undercover user complained shortly after that the same vendor sold pills that “almost killed me,” yet the informant again allowed the dealer to remain on the market and fill more than a thousand additional orders over the following months, the defense memo describes.

Lane had programmed a system to flag certain product listings on the site as potential sales of fentanyl, based on words like “strong opioid.” However, acting on the results of this surveillance system was the FBI informant’s job, the defense wrote in its memo, and the informant ignored alerts on several occasions, including alerts to a vendor who called itself RedLightLabs. In September of 2022, RedLightLabs sold pills to Red Churchill that were found next to his body after he overdosed. (Although the defense filing indicates that the informant ignored RedLightLabs’ incognito alert less than a week before Churchill’s death, it is not clear whether that decision was made before or after those pills were sold.) Two men, Michael Ta and Raj Srinivasan, He pleaded guilty in 2023 For running a RedLightLabs account and selling pills containing fentanyl to five people who died of overdoses.

In another case, during the first months of the informant joining the site — an infiltration of its management that Lane’s defense says was overseen by the FBI from the beginning — the informant and Lane discussed whether to maintain a ban on fentanyl on the market. Only excerpts of the text exchange are included in the filings. But at one point, the informant appears to make an argument in a user forum about “the power of free markets, which allows people to put whatever they want into their bodies,” according to a sample of their conversations relayed by the defense. The prosecution countered that the informant was not advocating this position, merely describing it, and instead making an argument for “harm minimization.”

After the conversation, Lin responded by creating a poll of the site’s users to determine whether the ban on fentanyl should be lifted, but then falsified the results of the poll to justify keeping the ban in place. However, the prosecution’s filing points to private messages from Lin stating that “the governance department is just PR and pretense anyway” as evidence that Lin did not actually believe banning fentanyl was effective.

Skeptical judge

At Lane’s sentencing hearing, prosecutors defended the FBI’s role in the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Finkel described the informant as merely a “middleman” on the site while Lane held the more powerful role as the site’s “administrator” — a distinction that Lane’s defense countered did not exist — and said the FBI’s use of the informant was necessary to identify Lane, charge him, and permanently bring down the market. The informant knew Lin only by his market alias, “Pharaoh.” Finkel argues that this means that although the informant may have been able to temporarily take down the market, he would have been able to rebuild it on a different server if he were still at large.

“The government did not turn on stealth mode,” Finkel told the judge. “The defendant did.” He went on to say that the FBI had to maintain a “balance” between harm reduction and the detective work needed to catch Lane. “This was a difficult case to solve, but they solved it.” ( flexible Indictment He points to blockchain trace evidence, an incognito server takeover, and a document found in his email proving his role in the market.)