With just the click of a button or a swipe on a phone, it’s possible to buy almost anything online, including rare or endangered animals. From quirky shark trophies to exotic live birds, contraband rhino horns or ivory, buyers can flock to e-commerce platforms and find them all. Traffickers hide behind their screens while profiting from online sales of protected species as these animals dwindle in the wild.
“It’s the largest wildlife market,” said wildlife trade researcher Chris Shepherd from the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s easy, it’s convenient; you can operate anonymously from the comfort of your home. You don’t have the expenses of setting up a shop.”
Online commerce in illicit wildlife products continues to grow, involving more species and wider geographies. It’s an illicit industry run by kingpins with well-connected networks, and it’s hard to prosecute. Catching online criminals is extremely challenging.
“Wildlife markets have moved from physical locations into online locations, and that’s mirroring broader trends in the global economy,” said Simone Haysom, director of environmental crime programs at the Swiss-based organisation Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
In a recent report, Haysom and her colleague Russell Grey analysed online wildlife trade data from April 2024 to March 2026. They focused on 10 countries across three continents, places where environmental crime and internet use are high, making them fertile grounds for online wildlife trafficking. They found some 266,535 wildlife products posted on 61 online marketplaces, worth about US$66 million.
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Meta needs to ask itself what role it wants to play in that process. Does it want to be the central platform where that trade is concentrated and scaled, or does it want to set a model for how to deal with the complex online trade?
Simone Haysom, director of environmental crime programs, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
About 75 per cent of the nearly 22,000 ads they saw were on Facebook, a platform that’s been notorious in selling live wildlife, as a recent Mongabay investigation revealed.
The large majority of the species offered online — about 84 per cent — are banned from any kind of international commercial trade under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), a global wildlife trade treaty. More than half of all Facebook ads offered endangered or critically endangered animals including pangolins, gibbons, hornbills, sea turtles, cobras and clouded leopards.
“There’s just anything and everything on Facebook,” said Gray, citing examples of pangolin boots, chimpanzee leather and ivory trinkets carved from walrus tusks. “The world is really significantly underprepared for cyber trade in wildlife.”
Though Facebook, Etsy, Amazon and eBay have policies prohibiting the sale of live animals and their products, online sales are rampant — and buyers are mopping them up.
“It’s great to see another report come out that keeps the online trade, and especially the issues regarding Facebook, in the spotlight,” said Shepherd, who has worked with platforms such as Etsy and eBay to stop the trade of painted woolly bats. This report, he said, shows that Facebook is “a massive trade hub” for imperiled species. Shepherd was not involved in the publication of this report.
Facebook is an ideal platform for traffickers
Facebook’s design makes selling wildlife easy, the authors say. Anyone can create an account or a private, members-only group — without physical verification or vetting, often using fake names or posting anonymously. Users can also communicate privately, using its encrypted messaging service.
But Facebook groups, which bring together people with shared hobbies or interests (in this case, wildlife trade), are a hub where buyers and sellers can negotiate via private messaging, making it difficult for investigators to track.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s algorithms track users’ activity and interests, and suggest similar pages, new contacts, groups and content rife with wildlife trade. The platform also lets users monetise their content: They can earn money by creating content for their paying subscribers.
Before Facebook groups, Haysom said most online wildlife trade was limited to random enthusiast platforms or websites that she likened to “small versions of Reddit” that focused on specific species or animal groups. But now, those have disappeared, she said.
“Facebook groups really replaced a lot of different types of sites on the Internet by providing this free infrastructure that was very good at marketing,” Haysom said.
Facebook prohibits the sale of “any product or part” from endangered and threatened animals, such as bone, teeth, horn, ivory, carcasses or live animals. In 2019, it also introduced pop-up alerts warning that trading endangered animals is illegal. But as the new report shows, ads offering these products are plentiful. The authors say that’s because Facebook does a poor job of moderating content.
While only 12 per cent of the posts were in English, most of the moderation was in English. “It’s a global platform, but [Facebook] isn’t moderating like a global platform,” Haysom said.
Other e-commerce platforms “seem to be more willing” to moderate what users post and take down content that violates their policies, Gray said. “Facebook doesn’t really have that [moderation].” In his experience, he said, “If you report something that is clearly illegal and goes against their community standards, they just send an automated message back to you saying it doesn’t go against the community standards, and they don’t take it down.”
Since 2018, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been a part of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, a group of corporations formed to crack down on illegal online commerce. In its latest report, the coalition said that between 2018 and 2025 it took down 63.3 million prohibited wildlife listings and blocked the sellers. But it didn’t detail where those listings were posted.
“You don’t know what’s been removed by who,” Haysom said. “We’re relying on Facebook to tell us what it’s done. There is no independent oversight.”
New pages and groups for animal sales keep appearing, the report says, with more than half of them created after Facebook joined the coalition, so constant surveillance is needed. When Facebook blocks users or closes a group, traffickers are quick to create another account or group, Shepherd said. “I can’t imagine anyone stopping selling illegal wildlife because their post has been taken down.”
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal went public in 2018, exposing 87 million users’ personal data to third parties for political advertising, Facebook has tightened access to its data for everyone, including civil society organisations that monitor wildlife trade. “So, there’s no way to automate searches and moderate the platform as a third party,” Gray said.
Since then, the platform has allowed users to post anonymously, which has helped illegal trade flourish, he said. “It’s like the dark web, really. There’s no real difference.”
Meta did not respond to Mongabay’s questions regarding the report’s findings — or steps it’s taking to combat wildlife trafficking on its platforms.
Buyers and sellers on Facebook
The report didn’t delve into the profiles of buyers or sellers. But their analysis shows, Gray said, that people selling animals on Facebook are often poachers who opportunistically hunt something exotic and want to sell it. It’s how they make initial contacts with wildlife traffickers and buyers.
“If they catch a pangolin, what do they do with it? The local community either won’t buy it because they know it’s illegal, or they just can’t afford it. So, the first thing that they’ll do is go to a group called ‘pangolins for sale’ on Facebook,” Gray said. “Then somebody will offer to buy it. And from that point on, they have contact with a greater network of wildlife traffickers.”
But these groups aren’t just buyers and sellers: Courier companies and escrow financial companies advertise their services to traffickers and middlemen who aggregate wildlife before exporting on a larger scale. Once someone finds a group, the algorithm does the job of showing them several more to boost their visibility, helping them build connections.
“We’re not just looking at markets, we’re also looking at the formation of networks … poachers being connected to middlemen,” Haysom said. “You actually only need a few people to compose a transnational wildlife trafficking train — and to do quite a lot of damage.”
Some poachers are double-dipping, making money through Facebook’s monetisation for content creators while selling rare, protected animals. “They’re hunting endangered wildlife, and they’re posting their activity on Facebook and also conducting their sales through those accounts,” Gray said. “This is either an established trend or it’s becoming a trend.”
Need for tighter regulations
The report calls for regulations that prevent platforms’ algorithms from amplifying content related to illegal wildlife trade. It also demands better surveillance of posts, especially those not in English. It’s also critical, authors say, for Facebook to open its moderation to independent oversight and to coordinate with law enforcement to nab traffickers.
“We need regulation with teeth,” Haysom said. “Self-regulation has not worked … and is unlikely to be fully successful.” She cited the EU’s Digital Services Act as an example. This 2022 law mandates online platforms to verify sellers and take down illegal content. “I don’t think it’s rocket science.”
Facebook and Instagram are currently under investigation in the EU for algorithms that encourage addictive behaviours in children and for their noncompliance with the act. Meta was recently found guilty by the European Commission for failing to prevent under-13 children from accessing its platforms.
Despite a multitude of reports and studies exposing unrelenting illegal wildlife trade on Facebook, Meta hasn’t been held accountable in the US, where it’s headquartered, because of protection under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law prevents U.S. internet service companies from liability for content posted by users — unless it violates federal criminal law and the government can show the company intentionally did so.
That’s often tricky to establish. “The government would need evidence that Meta was doing more than just hosting the post,” Gray said. “That is why, in practice, the question is not, ‘Was illegal wildlife sold on Facebook?’ It is, ‘Did Facebook itself knowingly participate in the crime?’”
But recent court rulings in California and New Mexico have held Meta liable for its content, specifically for harm to children’s mental health. The jury in New Mexico went as far as to say that Meta concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on the platform, thereby knowingly perpetuating the harm.
Gray said he hopes US policymakers see the need for regulations that hold online platforms accountable for other damaging activities. “As physical [wildlife] trade moves to digital trade, it’s going to be challenging in the future to regulate.”
Shepherd said platforms need to move beyond just removing posts. “That’s really just scratching the surface. What really needs to be done is the follow-up: Where are these people? Where are these animals that are being sold?” he said. “Enforcement action should be taken.”
He said online platforms must work with law enforcement agencies to catch traffickers and bring them to court. “They need to go beyond inconveniencing these trade groups and focus on prosecuting these people, arresting these people and putting them out of business.”
Time is running out for actions. The massive trade is contributing to what is being called the Sixth Mass Extinction, and many species are in serious trouble, teetering on the brink.
“Meta needs to ask itself what role it wants to play in that process. Does it want to be the central platform where that trade is concentrated and scaled, or does it want to set a model for how to deal with the complex online trade?” Haysom asked.
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
