Viagra website based in UK raided.

In a sleepy suburban street, police and undercover agents prepare to raid the HQ of a lucrative drugs ring. But this is not a squalid bedsit or dingy warehouse. It is a detached bungalow on a leafy lane in an affluent area.

Two months of investigation have led the cops and officers from the Medicines And Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to the address in Bristol, which they believe is the base for a website illegally selling Viagra.


When they produce their search warrant, the suspect, an average-looking bloke with greying hair, dressed in a green T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops, reluctantly lets them in. Shortly afterwards, he comes out of the house with his head down, a blank, defeated look on his face.


He opens the garage for the officers. Among the usual items - bikes, crates of books and old suitcases - are stacked large boxes of Jiffy bags and tablets. This is his dispatch room.
After a two-hour search, 14 items of evidence are seized - the hard drives of a number of computers and thousands of pounds worth of pills, most of them stored in shoe boxes. Some of the stash is pictured above right.

The evidence is placed into forensic plastic bags and piled on his drive in full view of his neighbours.
A couple of well-heeled locals stop on their way past and ask the police if there has been some kind of accident. They are simply told the activity is part of an ongoing enquiry.

Most of the tablets seized were manufactured in India. Reams of Viagra alternatives are produced legally in the country but are not licensed to be sold in the UK. Kamagra is the most popular Viagra substitute - so much so that officers are now even encountering counterfeit Kamagra as much as the "genuine" stuff.


Among the stash seized in Bristol were Kamagra tablets and jelly together with a number of other Indian Viagra copies including Erectalis, Silagra, Eriacta and the hair-loss remedy Finpecia.


Danny Lee-Frost, head of operations at the MHRA, said the raid was "as good as we could have hoped for," and added that the drugs will now be sent for testing.
The medicines are likely to be fake, but the officers will only have this confirmed after extensive lab tests.

The evidence will be taken away for analysis and the suspect will be asked to attend an interview. Having already received a community service order and 12-month suspended sentence in January for fraud, the father of three, in his mid-50s, will probably be sent to prison.

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