In Hyderabad, illegal weapon dealers are moving towards mainstream social media to establish weapons markets, including Facebook, Instagram, encrypted applications, and are effectively going undetected using advanced cyber methods. The intelligence sources indicate that gun trade in the city is quickly being moved out of the shadows and into the digital world, creating the fear of insecurity among the citizens, as well as fueling crime throughout the state of Telangana and the state of Telangana.
The first contact between weapons dealers and buyers is made through posts and groups on Facebook and Instagram, where this activity is usually disguised as a hobby or collector page. When there is a conversation, deals are transferred to encrypted services like WhatsApp, Snapchat, or Wickr, and the transactions are no longer visible to the eyes and under the control of platform moderation. The advertisers show off pictures of guns or just reference critical words, pushing the interested individuals to do the transaction offline and in secure chat rooms.
In May 2025, Hyderabad police broke up a large interstate gang that had connections with Uttar Pradesh and arrested men who had prepared to sell five country-made guns and 18 live rounds in the city. The accused was caught by contacts that were encrypted, and through the underground contacts, the accused would acquire the firearms and distribute them to the anti-social elements in Hyderabad. In another case in 2024, police confiscated seven weapons of illegal character, which were in the possession of an arms dealer in Neredmet. The investigators discovered that the dealer obtained weapons on the basis of contacts on social media and managed to avoid detection by transferring the conversation to the encrypted messengers.
Even weapons that are not lethal but limited are digitally transferred; in 2018, police apprehended twelve Hyderabad residents who purchased swords and daggers through the Internet and flaunted them on Facebook. The Task Force monitored them through their social media posts and organized raids to get back the weapons of illegality, which comprised ten swords, two daggers, and a knife.
Recent reports have pointed to the fact that today, social media is being scanned by cyber surveillance units using keywords, weapon pictures, and encrypted chat application connections. Criminals are typically dependent on lax enforcement and lax implementation of platform moderation; Facebook and Instagram may claim to block gun sales, but traffickers do change their identification or transfer their activity to other groups and accounts, always staying one step ahead of takedown.
Illegal weapons are ending up in the possession of gangsters and unemployed youths, who use them in crime or even display them in the streets. Police are in a hopeless situation: the digital trail can be quickly lost, accounts are created or re-created under new names, and encrypted apps provide little expectation of being able to recover conversations that have been deleted.
The case of Hyderabad is representative of a national movement. Criminal gun sales organized on a platform in which an Instagram bio directs to a WhatsApp transaction and Telegram closes transactions are transforming big cities into nexuses in a pan-Indian arms pipeline.
Cyber intelligence allows law enforcement to keep pace, and platforms are being encouraged to become more proactive in their intervention, yet traffickers are adapting and changing their tactics.
