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 organization Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
In a recent report, Haysom and her colleague Russell Gray analyzed 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 $66 million.
About 75% 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.
Live animals, including endangered ring-tailed lemurs, spider monkeys, and chimpanzees, are openly sold on Facebook, despite policies prohibiting sale of live animals. Identifying information of these posts are redacted by Mongabay. Images from social media (fair use).
The large majority of the species offered online — about 84% — are banned from any kind of international commercial trade under CITES, 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 (Kerivoula picta). 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’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 monetize 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% 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.
