How a digital drug dealer went about business quietly with a postal plan

Time of India

19 hours ago

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THE VENDOR HALL OF FAME
GOVT MAIL, CRIMINAL SALES
Kochi: Edison Babu's neighbours in Muvattupuzha knew him as the quiet engineer who had returned home during the pandemic.The 35-year-old former auto industry professional seemed to lead an unremarkable life in this sleepy Kerala suburb, occasionally visiting the local post office with packages: nothing unusual for someone running what appeared to be a small online business.What they didn't know was that their mild-mannered neighbour had built India's most sophisticated darknet drug empire, one that relied heavily on the very government postal service that was meant to serve the community. In a massive operation codenamed 'MELON' last week, the Narcotics Control Bureau ( NCB ) arrested Babu, revealing him as the mastermind behind 'Ketamelon', India's only level-4 darknet vendor — a top-tier status that made him the country's digital drug kingpin.The case exposes a striking paradox: the same government infrastructure built to connect citizens and deliver legitimate goods has become the primary highway for India's most prolific online drug dealers.Authorities seized 1,127 LSD blots, 131.66 grams of ketamine and Rs 70 lakh worth of cryptocurrency from Babu's operation, which had distributed over 600 drug shipments across India in just 18 months.The modern darknet drug trade operates like a twisted version of legitimate e-commerce, complete with customer service ratings, bulk discounts and next-day delivery.Babu's 'Ketamelon' operation exemplified this new breed of digital drug dealing , where vendors are rated on a scale of 1 to 5 stars based on their potency of drugs sold and customer service with level-4 status representing the criminal equivalent of Amazon Prime.Babu sourced large quantities of synthetic drugs through international vendors, primarily from UK-based supplier 'Gunga Din', believed to be linked to the notorious global LSD cartel 'Dr Seuss'— reputedly the world's largest LSD distributor. Once the drugs arrived through international couriers at places like Kochi Foreign Post Office, Babu would repackage them into smaller quantities and dispatch them across India using the country's postal network.The technical sophistication was impressive. During raids, authorities confiscated a pen drive containing TAILS OS, an operating system maintaining privacy and anonymity while browsing the internet, along with multiple cryptocurrency wallets, hard disks with incriminating documents and a hardware wallet.These were all Babu needed to build his multi-million marketplace of drugs on the darknet. The darknet, despite its ominous name, is simply the regular internet accessed through browsers like Tor that mask users' identities. No special skills or underground connections are required for this.Anyone can download Tor browser and access these hidden marketplaces in minutes, making the barrier to entry surprisingly low for both buyers and sellers.Payments flowed through cryptocurrency channels, with Monero serving as the new cash of the digital drug economy.Other popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin don't directly reveal the user's real-world identity but, with enough information, it's possible to link transactions back to a person. Meanwhile, Monero is designed to obscure transaction details like sender, receiver and transaction amounts. Think of bit-coin like a 10-year old note on the back of which everyone who owned it previously is marked. In contrast, every unit of Monero is indistinguishable from every other unit.Every time you spend a Monero, there are other decoys being spent, and all you know is that you are one of the many who spent the money. The receiver's Monero account does not appear on the blockchain; a one-ti-me-use address is what gets put on the blockchain, so the receiver's anonymity is also protected. The amount that gets sent is also confidential. The end result is that Mo-nero coins have no memory, the polar opposite of fiat money.While the digital trade offers near-perfect anonymity to both sellers and buyers, the NCB has learned to exploit the inevitable friction points where the virtual world meets physical reality. 'Though you are present in the darknet and do all your activities, you will have a bank account which is linked to your crypto account. So the traces are always present in the surface world,' said a senior NCB official. The agency can track packages to their sources, though with limited success so far, but has discovered that these tech-savvy dealers eventually must interface with the outside world — whether for collecting money or arranging shipments.According to the official, the typical journey of these vendors follows a predictable pattern: 'Most of these people who become vendors in the darknet are those who start their life as crypto traders. They pass out of college, start doing crypto trading, see some quick money, make some losses. Then probably they are a little bit addicted to drugs. Then they think, okay, better than crypto.' The official noted that most vendors are also users, with 'addiction always there. At least they used to take hydro weed or something'. While Kerala typically sees under 1,000 LSD blotters seized annually, Edison alone was allegedly selling close to 10,000 each month — each priced between Rs 2,500 and Rs 4,000, generating substantial monthly revenues that flowed seamlessly through cryptocurrency wallets.Babu's arrest represents the culmination of three-year crackdown that has systematically dismantled India's major darknet operations, each with names that sound more like tech startups than criminal enterprises. The pattern reveals both the scope of the problem and the peculiar creativity of digital drug dealers.In 2023, the NCB struck twice, taking down 'Rambada cartel' and 'Tile shop'— two separate vendor operations that had established significant customer bases across Indian cities. The cases followed similar patterns: tech-savvy operators using cryptocurrency, sourcing from international suppliers and distributing through postal networks.In 2024, NCB brought down the operator behind 'Hare Krishna', a vendor whose religious-sounding moniker masked a sophisticated distribution network. A separate case in Salem that year netted another major operator, bringing the total to four major busts in three years.According to the senior NCB official, that criminals needed such attractive names to draw customers itself shows how competitive the darknet marketplace has become. The NCB's success in the-se cases stems partly from their techni-cal evidence gathering.As the official explained, 'The technical evidence which we had been able to gather and put on record before the court is very strong. This is the reason why, though the period of incarceration is more than a year, none of them have been able to come out on bail.' The geographic pattern is telling: operations span from Kerala to Gurgaon, with 'Kerala, Bengaluru and Gurga-on becoming hotspots where these people get into crypto trading and also get lu-red into darknet and drug markets'. The common thread is India's IT-enabled ser-vices hubs, where 'the number of people who are having crypto accounts and crypto wallets will be very high'.Most arrests follow a similar investigative trail: months of surveillance, intercepted packages and raids that uncover sophisticated digital infrastructures. In the earlier 'Zambada' case — named after a Mexican cartel — the NCB arrested 14 people and sei-zed 29,013 LSD blots, 472 grams of MDMA and Rs 51.38 lakh in cash, revealing the scale these operations can achieve.One of the most striking aspects of India's darknet drug trade isn't its digital sophistication — it's its reliance on decidedly analogue government infrastructure. India Post, the country's sprawling postal network designed to connect remote villages with urban centres, has inadvertently become the logistics backbone for illegal drug distribution.The vulnerability is both systemic and shocking. As the senior NCB official bluntly acknowledged: 'The major cause of concern is the parcels which are going inside India. So once the contraband somehow enters into India, there is virtually no SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) in place for these courier and post office persons to do any scan or KYC check. Say, for example, a person is sending a parcel from Kochi to Delhi, absolutely, he can send anything. He can also send a pistol.'This creates an absurd theatre where the same postal workers who deliver government benefits like pensions, family letters and legitimate ecommerce packages also unknowingly ferry illegal drugs across the country. Babu made his twice-weekly trips to the Muvattupuzha post office like any small business owner, his packages blending seamlessly with legitimate commerce. The NCB has attempted to address this through regular meetings withIndia Post and private courier services, emphasising enforcement of KYC of the persons who come to book the parcels and CCTV cameras at the place where the person hand over the parcel. They've also pushed for Aadhaar-based verification after discovering 'multiple cases where fake Aadhaar details are being submitted'.Beyond these conventional measures, the agency has developed sophisticated pattern recognition tactics. Investigators now flag neighbourhoods where 'only a few houses or shops receive foreign shipments while larger neighbourhoods receive no such shipments'— ananomaly that often signals drug trafficking operations. The NCB is essentially laying digital nets at the interface points where virtual crime meets physical reality.The financial trail offers another avenue for detection. When crypto dealers convert their digital earnings to traditional bank accounts, these transactions can trigger suspicious transaction alerts.'There's a suspicious transaction alerts that is always there, which is already being given by banks to the income tax department,' noted the senior official, though he acknowledged that 'the number of STRs (suspicious transaction re-ports) is also very high,' making it challenging to separate legitimate cryp-to trading from criminal proceeds. But the fundamental postal problem remains unchanged. When asked directly about existing checks and balances, the senior official was refreshingly candid: 'There's no checks and balances to prevent it.'