Social Media Sites and Messaging Apps, Tools that are Widely Used by Illegal Animal Traders in Asia

Facebook became a wildlife marketplace for Malaysians who are doing illegal trades, selling threatened and iconic animals online.

Traffic did some research where the team monitored 14 Facebook groups for 30 minutes daily for five months. These groups are in Peninsular Malaysia where the team found more than 300 allegedly live, wild animals sold as pets. These animals include Sun Bears, gibbons and bearcats.

Peninsular Malaysia does not have an open trade compared to other places in South East Asia making the undocumented trade unexpected.

"The rise of social media appears to have enabled the creation of a thriving marketplace for wild animals as pets where one previously didn't exist in Malaysia," said Kanitha Krishnasamy, program manager for Traffic in Southeast Asia. She is also a co-author of the new report about the wildlife trade on Facebook.

The level of domestic trade in live animal is surprisingly high. Sixty percent of 80 species that were recorded being sold online were native to Malaysia. This indicates that there is a demand for local wild animals as pets. Almost 50 percent of the species was under the country's Wildlife Conservation Act 2010 and they are protected against trade, hunting and illegal to sell.

"Traders are clearly moving to non-conventional methods of sale such as utilizing online portals and social media in order to evade detection, reach a broader audience, and increase transaction efficiency and convenience," Traffic's report said.

Animal pictures were often posted to Facebook and other social photo sharing sites like Instagram as advertisement. Bargaining was done in messaging apps like WhatsApp in Malaysia and Blackberry Messenger in Indonesia.

On the other hand, Aljazeera reported that a wildlife monitor stated that in just a month in China last year, thousands of ivory products, a huge number of endangered birds and 77 whole rhino horns were found advertised for sale on popular sites in China such as WeChat and QQ.