NCB nabs hotel management graduate for selling drugs worth crores on darknet

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Sunday said they had arrested a 21-year-old hotel management graduate from Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow for allegedly being a member

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Sunday said they had arrested a 21-year-old hotel management graduate from Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow for allegedly being a member of an international drug syndicate that operated through the darknet.

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The arrested man, Dipu Singh, was involved in the supply of psychotropic drugs to the USA, the United Kingdom, Romania, Spain and other European countries after receiving orders on markets and payment in bitcoins on the darknet, NCB officials said. Singh was picked up 10 days ago.

NCB officials said that 22,200 tablets of psychotropic drugs worth around ₹15 lakh in the grey market were seized with the arrest of Singh on January 31. While 12,000 tablets were recovered from his home in Lucknow’s Arambagh, a parcel containing the drugs was seized by customs at Delhi airport. The parcel was being sent to the United Kingdom from Lucknow by Singh through a courier, they said.

“The psychotropic substances were being supplied in the garb of drugs to treat sexual ailments, fitness supplements and other health products. Another seizure of 33,000 such tablets was made by the NCB’s Mumbai zone in three operations,” NCB’s deputy director general Rajesh Nandan Srivastava said.

“Various such markets were accessed and different vendors were profiled to find links in India. This process was complemented with logistics analysis of suspicious parcels that were evading the Know Your Customer (KYC) norms. The exercise led to the identification of Indian vendors, with Dipu Singh emerging as a key player. The blockchain analysis of cryptocurrency wallets was also undertaken to unearth Indian connections,” Malhotra said.

NCB officials monitored Singh’s activities and learnt about a consignment of drugs he had couriered to a client in the UK. The consignment was seized and Singh was arrested from his home in Lucknow.

“Singh’s interrogation revealed that he was brought into the drug syndicate in 2018 by a man who operates an online pharmacy and had offered him a job to deliver medicines online. By early 2019, Singh associated with darknet markets and began supplying psychotropic tablets illegally to clients abroad. He has sent over 600 consignments of drugs using the darknet,” Srivastava added.

NCB officials said that Singh completed his graduation in hotel management from a private university in 2019 and his father is a retired government official.

NCB’s director general Rakesh Asthana said that apart from Singh’s arrest and recovery of psychotropic tablets, the bureau had busted the organisation’s pan-India operations in the last few days and seized narcotic substances worth ₹44.58 crore.