The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Sunday said it has arrested the country’s first ‘darknet’ narcotics operative who was responsible for allegedly shipping a huge number of psychotropic drugs to foreign countries in a clever and secret manner.
As per reports, the narcotics operative have been identified as Dipu Singh who used to allegedly ship psychotropic drugs in the garb of sex stimulation drugs.
According to the NCB, Singh used to ship to countries like the USA, UK, Romania, Spain and some European nations using the dark web.
Moreover, Singh is the son of a retired Army officer and was a hotel management graduate from Amity University in Lucknow.
The 21-year-old man was arrested by the sleuths of the Delhi zonal unit of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) from Lucknow recently.
After conducting raids at Singh’s residence at Alam Bagh area in Lucknow, the NCB recovered 12,000 tablets of various psychotropic drugs.
NCB deputy director general (operations) Rajesh Nandan Srivastava said that Singh initially began with shipping medicines related to erectile dysfunction and fitness supplements to overseas locations using the dark internet facility, but later shifted to transacting in psychotropic drugs under this garb seeing the profit margin in this illegal trade.
“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 added.
Moreover, the NCB seized a total of 55000 tablets as a part of the two-month-long operation ‘Operation Trance’ that was launched in December last year with an aim to recover illegal drugs that were cleverly being shipped using the dark web.
Apart from NCB, some international agencies are also a part of this operation.
The investigation in the case is ongoing as the NCB is looking at the links of Singh and others associated with him.
It may be mentioned that darknet refers to a deep hidden internet platform used to carry out highly illegal activities by using the secret alleys of the onion router (ToR) to stay away from the surveillance of law enforcement agencies.