Dark web allows drug dealers to ship narcotics at will as police struggle
DRUG dealers are brazenly sending narcotics straight to Sydney homes by hiding them in everything from Thank You cards to children’s lolly bags.
NSW
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DEADLY narcotics are being delivered through the post to the doorstep of Sydney homes — and authorities admit the latest method of drug dealing is so brazen and so prolific it’s nearly impossible to stop.
A special investigation by The Daily Telegraph inside the Sydney International Mail Gateway at Granville can today expose how widespread this seemingly old-school but technically brilliant criminal ploy has become.
In one hour, we saw a single Australia Border Force officer detect nine drug packages.
They use a combination of X-ray machines, sniffer dogs, chemical swabs and old-fashioned nous like honing in on certain countries of origin to find the secreted stashes.
The drugs can be hidden in birthday cards, mechanical parts or even children’s cute lolly bags — with one dealer sending pills mixed in with Haribo lollies. Across 10 days over Christmas, the Granville officers found an astounding 100kg of narcotics.
In a single year, they detect about 20,000 illegal drug packages. Country of origin, the way mail is addressed, and intelligence on global drug trends are all used as flags to identify suspicious packages.
But with 200 million items of international mail flowing into the city each and every year, the ABF has conceded to The Daily Telegraph it only has resources to inspect about 30 per cent of the packages. And criminal lawyers say it’s the perfect crime for both dealers and buyers.
Finding the source of the drugs is almost impossible because transactions are carried out over the “dark web” — an area of the internet notencrypted notoriously hard to trace.
Border protection can intercept the mail, but prosecuting consumers is almost impossible as they can simply deny they were behind the order.
One new trend identified by police actually has buyers deliberately using the address of strangers.
They then wait for the mail to arrive and grab it from the letterbox before the unsuspecting homeowner even knows what has happened.
Acting ABF Assistant Commissioner Tim Fitzgerald said that while the anonymity of the dark web might seem convenient, it also made it incredibly dangerous.
He said there were recent cases of the highly lethal drug fentanyl being sent through the post to Australian users who thought they had ordered cocaine.
Daily Telegraph editorial: Exposing evil of dark web
“The dark net will just send them whatever substance, and in a number of instances it’s deadly substances like fentanyl and carfentanil. These are deadly products, they’re killing hundreds of people a day across the US and Europe,” Mr Fitzgerald said. “The smallest contact with this sort of product can be deadly.”
“We’ve been working for years to build intelligence on the dark net ... the misconception that just because you purchase over the dark net it’s an anonymous purchase and it’s not visible to law enforcement agencies, including the ABF, is completely false.”
Fentanyl and its derivatives, including carfentanil, are opioids up to 10,000 times stronger than morphine.
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Australians ordering drugs on the dark net often use cryptocurrencies or prepaid credit cards, meaning there is no financial record of the purchase. And in a figure that shows the scale of what the authorities are up against, it has been revealed there are more than 6000 dark net drug transactions by Australians every month.
Criminal Defence Lawyers Australia principal Jimmy Singh said prosecution was difficult for police. And even if they can make charges stick, they’re usually minor.
“If they can’t prove you had knowledge the parcel had an illicit drug in it — then you can’t be found guilty,” Mr Singh said. “(And) there could be multiple people living at the house.
They’d have to investigate the computers at that address … and that would require search warrants.”
In Western Australia, police were recently left mopping up a major drug overdose when nine backpackers snorted a white powder that was mysteriously posted to their address. They assumed the drug was cocaine — but it turned out to be motion sickness drug hyoscine.
“You can’t move your legs. You can’t move nothing,” a female who took the drug told media five days after being released from hospital.
This week in the inner city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills a 31-year-old woman found an envelope containing a white powder in her mailbox. It was in a Thank You card.
“The card had sticky tape all around the edges to keep the powder inside,” she said.
“There was no writing inside — just this flaky white substance.”
Police later confirmed it was cocaine.
Macquarie University dark net expert Dr James Martin said “most” drug deals were successful because overseas dealers were so sophisticated in the approach. “For instance, they’ll clean an envelope with bleach in one room after they packed them in another room,” Dr Martin said.
He also said that purchasing drugs online and through the post eliminated the risk of street dealing. “There is no potential for violence between buyers and sellers, or between sellers,” Dr Martin said. “If you see every envelope … not taken place on the street by a dealer who is scared of being rolled by another dealer so feels the need to carry a gun. And the substances tend to be less adulterated.”
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