The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Sunday arrested the country’s first “darknet” narcotics operative (vendor) who allegedly shipped hundreds of parcels containing psychotropic drugs to offshore locations in the garb of sex stimulation medicines.
Dipu Singh, 21, son of a retired Army officer, was arrested by the sleuths of the Delhi zonal unit of the NCB from Lucknow recently.
During the searches, 12,000 tablets of various psychotropic drugs were seized from his residence.
“Singh is a major player on the darknet. His listings were found in one of the biggest and reliable darknet markets like Empire Market and Majestic Garden. He clandestinely couriered hundreds of drug parcels to countries like the USA, UK, Romania, Spain and some other European nations using the darkweb,” NCB Deputy Director General (DDG) (operations) Rajesh Nandan Srivastava said.
“Singh initially began his operation with shipping medicines related to erectile dysfunction and fitness supplements to overseas locations using the darkinternet facility, but later shifted to transacting psychotropic drugs,” the DDG said.
“A bachelor in hotel management from Amity University in Lucknow, Singh had mastered the technique to disguise identity while making a shipment”, the NCB said in a statement.
A total of 55,000 psychotropic tablets that includes tramadol, zolpidem, alprazolam have been seized as part of this two-month-long multi-national operation that was conducted with cooperation from international agencies, NCB Delhi zonal director K P S Malhotra said. Some drugs ere seized from Mumbai and the United Kingdom.
Darknet or darkweb refers to the deep hidden Internet platform that is often used for illegal activities like sale of narcotics, exchange of pornographic content and the like using the secret and layered alleys of the onion router (ToR) to evade surveillance of law enforcement agencies.
Darknet is considered very tough to crack by the investigators due to its end-to-end encryption,
The NCB was part of a global ‘Operation Trance’, launched in December last year, entailing a joint intelligence gathering action on international postal, express mail and courier shipments containing psychotropic drugs (which can only be purchased on a doctor’s prescription and are barred to be sold over the counter) that are abused as sedatives and painkillers by the drug addicts.
The latest darknet ring was unearthed as part of this operation, which has international linkages and is spread across Singapore and the US and services of global post offices and international couriers were used as logistics for the illicit trade, Srivastava said.
“The payment gateways of cryptocurrency like Bitcoins and Litecoin were used by the operators to conceal the transactions from regulatory agencies,” the NCB DDG said.
The orders were procured from darknet and routed through various wicker identities, WhatsApp and some business-to-business platforms.
The investigation in the case is ongoing as the NCB is looking at the links of Singh and others associated with him, Malhotra added.