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Leading the Digital Charge against Wildlife Crime in Asia Pacific

Posted on 21 May 2025

A Regional Approach to Tackle Illegal Wildlife Trade Online

The Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) is one of the world’s most profitable criminal enterprises, valued at up to USD 20 billion annually. Increasingly, this trade is shifting from traditional physical markets to digital platforms, where it operates with greater anonymity and lower risk of detection. Traffickers use a patchwork of online tools—social media, messaging apps, e-commerce platforms, and even livestreams—to advertise and sell everything from ivory to exotic pets. This move online enabled individual sellers and organised syndicates alike to exploit global reach, encrypted transactions, and inconsistent platform moderation.

Unlike many other illegal markets that are often confined to the dark web, significant online wildlife trafficking occurs in the open—on public-facing platforms. Listings for endangered species, body parts, and exotic pets often include vague descriptions or code words, making them difficult to detect through standard content moderation tools. Sellers use closed groups, emojis, misspellings, and visual-only listings to evade platform policies and law enforcement. As identified by Eco-Solve’s recent global report, the ease of access to these listings and the lack of consistent monitoring or regulation means traffickers operate with high impunity, especially in biodiversity-rich regions with limited law enforcement capacity like Southeast Asia.

To address this growing digital threat, the WWF Asia-Pacific Counter-IWT Hub (the Hub) and WWF-Singapore are spearheading a coordinated regional response. The Hub brings together civil society, law enforcement, and technical experts to create an integrated strategy that includes public awareness, machine learning tools, intelligence training and cross-border collaboration. By investing in both people and technology, the Hub is working to close the gap between wildlife criminals operating online and the systems trying to stop them. Since Southeast Asia is home to up to 20% of the world’s plant and animal species— many of them highly sought after in illegal markets—this work has never been more urgent.

Laying the Foundations for Scalable, Intelligence-Led Enforcement

In 2022, WWF partnered with AI Singapore (AISG) to develop a machine learning system capable of identifying illegal wildlife product listings online. Integrated into WWF’s Cyber Spotters citizen science programme, the tool draws from a growing library of annotated content—including images and keywords depicting pangolin scales, ivory, elephant skin, wildcat parts and marine turtle products—to detect illicit listings with high accuracy and precision. This AI system now powers a regional dashboard, funded by WWF’s cross-practice Innovation Fund, which visualises emerging trends across platforms and species. With future data contributions from multiple WWF offices, the dashboard will enable real-time detection, prioritisation of high-risk listings, and smarter interventions that support both enforcement and outreach.

‘The use of machine learning to detect and isolate potential IWT products on online marketplaces provides a novel and efficient method to understand the breadth of the trade. We are proud to have partnered WWF on this initiative and happy to see this type of technology being used to address environmental issues,’ said Mr. Kevin Oh, Head of 100 Experiments programme at AI Singapore.

These technological advancements are being paired with local enforcement action. In Malaysia’s Sabah region—where bird species are currently the most frequently traded through closed social media groups—WWF-Malaysia and the Hub partnered with the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC) to train officers from the Sabah Wildlife and Forestry Departments in cybercrime investigation techniques. Between July and September 2022, officers received hands-on training in open-source intelligence (OSINT), digital evidence collection and online investigative strategies. Ongoing mentoring and tailored intelligence support helped advance several active investigations, underscoring the importance of long-term capacity-building in combating online wildlife crime.

‘At WWF Malaysia, especially the Sabah office, we have a long history of working with local law enforcement and government departments and we were happy to use our influence to offer the WJC training to SWD and SFD. Since the training, we have seen an increase in capability and capacity in this area which has been further expanded due to the Galvanise programme,’ said Ms. Sharon Koh, Senior Manager, Sabah Landscapes Programme at WWF Malaysia.

To ensure these efforts translate into long-term impact, WWF invested in WJC’s Galvanise programme, which embeds trained cybercrime analysts directly within enforcement agencies. These analysts are linked via the secure Online Resource Centre for Analysis (ORCA) platform to share cross-border intelligence and assist with live investigations. Early OSINT training in Sabah helped lay the groundwork for this initiative, which transforms one-off workshops into institutionalised capacity. Today, embedded analysts are not only contributing to real-time casework but also shaping national enforcement strategies and fostering regional intelligence-sharing networks.

Shaping Systems, Scaling Solutions

As the online wildlife trade evolves, the Hub is not only responding to current threats but also helping to shape the systems needed to address them in the long term. In 2022, Hub representatives contributed to the Interpol Wildlife Crime Working Group and, in 2024, Hub representatives took part in global forums like the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online review in Cambridge, workshops hosted by Eco-Solve and Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) in Vienna and contributed to the Working Group on Technology for the UNITE project. These platforms are advancing the conversation on transparency, ethical use of AI and the importance of consistent monitoring frameworks across jurisdictions.

Despite commitments from tech companies to remove illegal wildlife content, enforcement remains patchy and transparency limited. To close these gaps, WWF continues to call for stronger accountability mechanisms, open access to monitoring data and adaptive platform policies that keep pace with trafficking tactics. WWF maintains direct engagement with digital platforms like Meta, working to strengthen content moderation, enhance data-sharing processes, and push for greater collaboration between conservation and tech communities.

Looking ahead, the Hub’s priorities include scaling the Cyber Spotters programme across more WWF country offices, thereby expanding the training dataset for the machine learning tool to cover a broader range of species and platforms, and embedding more Galvanise analysts within enforcement agencies. Insights from ongoing monitoring will also guide targeted demand reduction campaigns and digital deterrents.

This integrated model—combining cutting-edge technology, on-the-ground capacity, data-driven intelligence and system-level advocacy—has already demonstrated its potential. But lasting impact requires sustained investment, greater regional adoption and bold cooperation across sectors. Every listing flagged, every officer trained, and every partnership built is a step closer to dismantling the digital networks driving IWT. And this is only the beginning.