Police Dismantle Darknet Market Incognito with Help from Binance Investigations
The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of Binance has assisted the USA and Taiwan in taking down a darknet marketplace with a volume of $100 million. Operation “RapTor” marked the largest police crackdown on the darknet to date.
Like all cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance cannot avoid increasingly close collaboration with law enforcement agencies. The exchange demonstrated this recently when it took part in Operation „RapTor.“
As Binance explained on its website here, its own FIU played a key role in bringing down the „Incognito Market,“ a major darknet marketplace for the illicit trade of drugs, through which more than $100 million in illegal transactions had been processed.
According to Binance, on „Incognito“ users could purchase more than a thousand types of illegal drugs—including heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines—and pay with cryptocurrencies. The platform had built its own banking infrastructure for these transactions, “heavily reliant on crypto assets.” However, what was “intended by the criminals as a shield, ultimately became a trail.”
Although “Incognito” used “advanced privacy tools” as well as “multiple firewall layers”, Binance’s FIU managed to identify the wallets of the internal banking system and trace the flow of transactions. This led to the wallets of a Taiwanese individual, who went by the online alias “Pharaoh” and made millions leading the platform’s illegal operations.
More than $2.5 million in crypto assets linked to the “Incognito Market” were frozen on Binance. Pharaoh was arrested and has since pleaded guilty before a US court.
According to the US Department of Justice, the “Raptor” operation went far beyond the “Incognito Market.” It was the largest operation the Department has ever conducted in the darknet so far. 270 vendors, buyers and administrators were arrested in numerous countries—mainly in Europe and the United States. Authorities also seized more than $200 million in fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, two metric tons of drugs—including 144 kilograms of fentanyl—as well as 180 firearms.
The press release does not mention Binance. However, this does not stop the exchange from highlighting its own role: this was not the first time it had played a “key role” in uncovering illegal networks. The case, they say, is more than just an isolated victory—it is part of an ongoing streak of successes that “underlines our deep-rooted commitment to protecting the crypto space.” Each such successful operation proves that, “when public and private forces collaborate, cybercriminals lose—and justice prevails.”