Incognito [offline]

Incognito [offline]

Active Since

October 2020 (Inactive since March 2024)

Approximate number of listings in 2023

29k

Approximate number of vendors in 2023

1.2k

Clear web or dark web

Dark web

Predominant languages

English, German

Known admins / staff

IncognitoOfficial, CurlyDock, pharoah, Burian

All of the listings on Incognito were drugs related, with no digital or fraud products.

One notable feature of Incognito was the option to use semantic search (matches meaning of searchterm(s) accounting for user intent and search context, rather than exact matches and variants – known as lexical search).

Incognito also had a community governance section where users could make proposals related to the market and vote on them (e.g. adding a new feature) and the Incognite Foundation that users can donate funds to, which (it claimed) then get distributed to orgs such as Tor Project, Monero and Medecins Sans Frontieres.

In March 2024 it was reported that the administrators of Incognito Marketplace had perpetrated an exit scam with a particularly sinister twist. Speculation arose that the market was perpetrating an exit scam as early as March 6 when multiple users reported that they were unable to withdraw their cryptocurrency. Then on March 10 a message appeared on the site saying there was one “final little nasty surprise”. The message explicitly blackmailed the site’s vendors, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000.

However, this time the administrators of the forum didn’t manage to get away with the exit scam their perpetrated. In May 2024 the US Department of Justice announced that they had arrested pharoah, one of the market administrators whose real life identify was Rui-Siang Lin.

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