Hyderabad: The state government has informed the US government through the local consulate, and Interpol via the Narcotics Control Bureau, that darknet markets, private vendor shops, invite-only and referral markets that have been identified to be selling drugs in the deepweb, need to be shut down.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had recently taken down a darknet site called Alphabay after a crackdown on a drug network spreading across Bangkok and the US.
The investigation into the drug racket by the excise Special Investiga-tion Team found that CGMC (Cannabis Growers and Merchants Cooperative), House of Lions Market, Zion Market, The Majestic Garden, Trade Point, and Green Street are popular darknet sites on the deepweb for the city’s drug buyers and peddlers, and most of them have servers in the US and Europe.
A top source in the Excise department said that the state government “shared information with the NCB regarding the deepweb forums and markets. The help of local US consulate officials was also sought to tackle the darknet drug markets.”
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The official said Cannabis Growers and Merchants Cooperative (CGMC) is a private, invite-only marketplace, operating since 2016 and offering cannabis products and mushrooms to members. Some of the markets and forums are exclusively for psychedelic drugs like LSD and magic mushrooms that create hallucinations.
“Majestic Garden is not a full-fledged darknet market but more of a forum for psychedelics. It offers P2P transactions. There are no wallets to be maintained. House of Lions, previously known as Leo Market, is an escrow darknet market. It is a relatively small dark web marketplace that only features hundreds of listings,” said a SIT official.
RAMP (Russian Anonymous Market Place) is another site popular among city drug peddlers in the darknet.
A TS cybercrime official said, “Tor browsers are used to navigate the darknet. Hackers can use tools to locate the servers of deepweb. Recently, hackers brought down hundreds of sites in deepweb. FBI is also capable of doing it. Drug peddlers, human traffickers, organ transplant gangs, arms dealers use this. Mostly the hackers or agencies act as prospective buyers.”
