NEW DELHI: In a major blow to the growing digital narcotics trade, Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has recently busted a darknet-enabled pan-India synthetic drug distribution network. It was the result of a three-month intelligence-led operation in the national capital. Two suspects, including the alleged kingpin, have been arrested. The cartel was known as ‘Team Kalki’ and had acquired a four-star rating over the darknet because of its purported “reliability and quality of the drugs it used to supply”.NCB has seized designer narcotics like 2,338 LSD blotters, 3.6 kg of liquid MDMA and 160 MDMA pills, besides hashish and amphetamine worth several crores in the international market. The contraband was intercepted from 13 domestic parcels and two international shipments originating from the Netherlands.
“The network was spearheaded by one Anurag Thakur and Vikas Rathi, two suspects who have previous criminal records,” an NCB spokesperson said, adding that the two crossed paths while serving time in Tihar jail for prior drug-trafficking offences.Thakur, who has a BBA degree from a private university, was the technical expert and the brains behind the cartel. Rathi, a graduate from Rohtak, was its ‘boots-on-the-ground’ and handled distribution and clientele.Thakur was earlier jailed for methamphetamine trafficking, while Rathi was held for distributing charas. Upon their release, the duo leveraged their criminal connection to launch ‘Team Kalki’ in Jan 2025 and built a reputation on Dread, a dark web forum. It eventually migrated its operations to Session, an encrypted messaging application, to further anonymise their dealings with select clientele. The network’s reach was expansive. It used to source high-grade LSD and MDMA from international suppliers in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. To evade law enforcement, it employed a ‘dead drop’ technique, which involved leaving drugs at pre-determined hidden locations, for trusted clients in Delhi.“The cartel used a rotating array of different courier services and Speed Post to complete more than 1,000 orders across states, including Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Kerala and Karnataka,” said an official.Its financial backbone was complex, involving the use of un-hosted cryptocurrency wallets to accept payments in Monero and USDT. To obscure the money trail, it routed funds through multiple intermediary ‘mule’ wallets and layers of conversion, eventually moving the proceeds into cold storage or the formal banking system via KYC-compliant accounts.While multiple electronic devices and a cryptocurrency wallet have been recovered, NCB’s investigation remains active as it works to trace the full international supply chain.The cartel’s focus was on distributing LSD and MDMA due to their clique user-base, which likes the kind of high these designer drugs provide.LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, is a potent psychedelic derived from ergotamine. Usually distributed as small paper blotters or in liquid form, it is known for inducing vivid hallucinations. MDMA functions as both a stimulant and a hallucinogen. Frequently sold as ‘ecstasy’ in pill form or ‘molly’ as a powder, the drug works by triggering a massive release of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, resulting in intense euphoria, emotional warmth and heightened sensory perception.
