Illegal wildlife trafficking is big business — with roughly $20 billion of protected flora and fauna sold on the black market annually, according to Interpol.

Smugglers try to sell everything from elephant ivory to fish organs for use in traditional medicine, fashion, decor and food. Live animals, such as big cats, are also trafficked out of their homes and into captivity. 

Interpol warns that wildlife trafficking is more than an environmental crime. It’s increasingly connected to armed violence, corruption and other forms of organized crime as poachers use money raised from sales of wildlife to fund illicit transnational activities. 

With smugglers relying on the internet to sell their illegal wares, eBay has joined with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to ensure its platform remains free from trafficked wildlife. 

From Physical to Digital Marketplaces

Over the last decade, wildlife traffickers have attempted to misuse online platforms, with social media becoming a key tool for traffickers. They often disguise illegal activity behind seemingly ordinary posts or ads to lure buyers before shifting conversations to encrypted apps where transactions are harder for authorities to trace. At times, bad actors use illicit wildlife to pay for drugs such as fentanyl. 

eBay recognized this shift early on and began working with WWF in 2012 to tackle illegal ivory sales. In 2018, eBay became a founding member of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online — a group launched by WWF, TRAFFIC and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to unite companies in fighting the digital wildlife trade.

Today, the collaboration now has 50 digital platforms across 40 different companies, all committed to standardizing wildlife policies and leveraging technology to identify and remove illegal wildlife content.

AI Monitoring and Personal Outreach

Many of the companies in the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online rely on large language models to identify illegal postings. The coalition has been able to provide a database of over 4,000 search terms in 17 languages that help detect common trafficking code words. It’s improved and sped up the monitoring process, helping to keep platforms safe. 

“The aim is to have the tech industry standardize their policies as it relates to prohibited wildlife content, and train the staff to better detect the illicit wildlife products that are popping up on their platforms, ” Sara Grange, program officer at WWF, said. 

eBay and others also have image recognition models that, when combined with the language database, are helping pull illegal products up even faster. 

But some sales are a one-off from a user who doesn’t realize that what they’re selling is illegal, rather than an organized crime. That’s why eBay’s approach includes both enforcement and user education — helping to prevent future violations before they happen.

The collaboration is designed to complement the work of law enforcement. While authorities have the jurisdiction to focus their efforts on building cases and gathering evidence that dismantles organized trafficking networks, platforms such as eBay play a critical role in tackling the millions of lower-scale, unorganized transactions that can slip under the radar due to limited enforcement capacity. 

Leading By Example

One of the largest benefits of bringing all these tech companies together is that they can discuss what works for them – preventing traffickers from bouncing around on different platforms. Gia Schneider, lead specialist at the WWF, said there was even a platform that noticed an uptick in their illegal sales as those illegal sales went down on eBay – as if the listings had been copied and pasted onto this other platform. WWF advised the platform to study eBay’s success.

“[The platform] did and it was awesome. I think for us, that’s exactly what we wanted to see – we provide the resources to help them understand and then they take all of that learning that they have from actually applying it and then share that with each other.” Schneider said.

As the illegal wildlife trade evolves, so will eBay, the WWF, and others in advancing technologies, refining policies and doing everything possible to protect the planet’s most vulnerable species.