An engineer in India has been arrested on charges of operating a darknet marketplace. He allegedly used the privacy coin Monero (XMR) for money laundering.
During Operation MELON, law enforcement detained a 35-year-old engineer named Edison. They seized 1,127 LSD tabs, ketamine, and cryptocurrencies worth over $82,000 from him.
The investigation spanned four months, with authorities tracking Edison’s operations, which allegedly included over 600 drug shipments to cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh.
According to local media, Edison operated for two years under the alias Ketamelon. He was considered the country’s only Level-4 darknet vendor. The drugs were sourced from a British supplier, Gunga Din, reputed to be the world’s largest LSD distributor.
For transactions and concealing them, the vendor used XMR. Andrew Firman, head of intelligence at Chainalysis, commented to Decrypt that privacy coins do not guarantee complete anonymity. He noted that most criminals still prefer Bitcoin and Ethereum due to their liquidity.
Firman pointed out that confidential assets operate on an immutable ledger, meaning transaction evidence is preserved indefinitely.
In March, Chainalysis cybercrime researcher Eric Jardine reported that darknet marketplaces are reverting to Bitcoin as the primary payment tool following Monero’s delisting from exchanges.
However, operators of shadow platforms are returning to privacy coins, having realized the implications of using digital gold due to its transparency, analysts noted in May.
Back in March, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added 44 Bitcoin and five Monero addresses linked to the closed darknet marketplace Nemesis Market to its sanctions list. Among other activities, the platform distributed illicit substances.
