Blood of the Leopard (BoL) – Living Intelligence Assessement and Blood of the Leopard (BoL) – Overview and Links to Sections.
The Online Marketplace The Digital Hunting Ground
BoL – The Online Marketplace
The Digital Hunting Ground
Updated: 17 September 2026
Current Assessment: HIGH — DEVELOPING
The illegal wildlife trade has entered a new phase.
The internet has not replaced the physical wildlife trade. A leopard still has to be killed. A skin still has to be removed. A body part still has to be transported. A buyer still has to receive it.
But increasingly, the processes connecting those events can take place through a digital environment.
Social media, messaging applications, online groups, e-commerce platforms and digital payment systems can connect buyers, sellers, intermediaries and traffickers across geographical boundaries. Digital technology can facilitate contact, recruitment, coordination, advertising, negotiation, payment and delivery.
The result is not a separate phenomenon called “online wildlife crime”.
It is traditional wildlife crime with an increasingly sophisticated digital operating layer.
For Blood of the Leopard, this distinction matters.
The digital marketplace is not simply another place where leopard parts are advertised. It is potentially another layer of the trafficking system — and an increasingly important source of intelligence.
1. From Marketplace to Infrastructure
Early attention to online wildlife crime focused largely on advertisements: photographs of animals, skins, claws, teeth, bones and other products offered for sale.
That remains important.
But recent evidence suggests that the digital environment is doing much more than displaying commodities.
It can facilitate:
CONTACT → RECRUITMENT → EQUIPMENT → TARGET IDENTIFICATION → COORDINATION → KILLING → PROCESSING → ADVERTISING → NEGOTIATION → PAYMENT → DELIVERY
Not every trafficking case follows this sequence, and not every stage is digital.
The physical crime remains essential.
But digital technology can reduce the distance between stages that were previously more difficult to connect.
The result is a wildlife trade that can operate simultaneously in two environments:
The physical world
Wildlife is hunted, trapped, killed, processed, transported and delivered.
The digital world
People can find one another, exchange information, advertise commodities, negotiate prices, arrange payments, conceal identities and establish relationships.
The two worlds increasingly overlap.
2. The Scale of the Digital Trade
Research published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) in April 2026 provides one of the clearest recent measurements of this phenomenon.
Between 14 April 2024 and 1 March 2026, GI-TOC’s Global Monitoring System recorded 21,904 illegal wildlife trade advertisements containing 266,535 wildlife products across 61 online platforms.
Of those advertisements, 16,290 — approximately 74% — were on Facebook.
The advertisements with stated prices represented a combined advertised value of approximately US$66 million, with Facebook accounting for approximately 98.5% of that recorded value.
GI-TOC concluded that Facebook had become the central public infrastructure through which the online wildlife trade in its dataset was being concentrated, discovered and scaled.
The findings also demonstrate the conservation significance of the trade.
Approximately 84% of Facebook advertisements in the dataset involved CITES Appendix I taxa, while 58.3% involved species classified as endangered or critically endangered in the study’s assessment.
These figures should not be interpreted as a measurement of the entire global illegal wildlife trade. They represent a large and structured monitoring dataset and therefore provide an indication of the scale and concentration of detectable online activity.
They nevertheless demonstrate that online wildlife trafficking is no longer a peripheral problem.
3. Meta: More Than a Passive Marketplace
Meta deserves particular attention because Facebook and Instagram appear repeatedly in the evidence.
The issue is not simply that illegal wildlife products can be found on Meta’s platforms.
The more serious question is whether the architecture of the platforms can help trafficking activity spread and become more connected.
A July 2026 investigation, Clicks That Kill: Meta’s Algorithm of Extinction, produced by a coalition including Freeland, Education for Nature Vietnam, International Wildlife Trust, Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection and PEGAS, documented hundreds of accounts across numerous countries trading protected wildlife and wildlife products through Meta platforms.
The investigation alleges that recommendation systems can connect users encountering wildlife-trafficking content with additional trafficker accounts, including through recommendations such as “People You May Know”. It also raises concerns about whether Meta’s content-monetisation systems may financially benefit accounts involved in wildlife trafficking.
These are findings and allegations made by the investigators and should be distinguished from independently established facts.
They are nevertheless significant enough that Meta’s role can no longer be considered simply a question of individual users breaking platform rules.
The central intelligence question is therefore:
Does the platform merely contain the market, or can its own systems contribute to the market’s growth and connectivity?
The evidence increasingly points toward the need to investigate that question seriously.
4. Facebook: The Evidence Is Already Substantial
The GI-TOC research provides an independent and particularly important body of evidence.
Facebook accounted for approximately three-quarters of the wildlife-trafficking advertisements detected across the 61 platforms monitored.
Even more significant, 78% of the Facebook records were encountered without researchers actively searching for them.
This suggests that illegal wildlife content is not necessarily visible only to people deliberately seeking wildlife products.
It can be encountered through the normal operation of online groups, feeds, recommendations and connected communities.
That changes the potential pathway between supply and demand.
The sequence may not always be:
DESIRE → SEARCH → DISCOVERY → PURCHASE
It may instead become:
EXPOSURE → CURIOSITY → INTEREST → COMMUNITY → CONTACT → PURCHASE
That distinction is important for understanding both the market and the human behaviour underlying it.
5. The Facebook Group Problem
GI-TOC found that Facebook groups accounted for approximately 76% of Facebook detections in its monitoring dataset.
Groups can provide something that a conventional advertisement cannot:
community.
They can bring together people with shared interests, create trust between buyers and sellers, provide repeated exposure to wildlife products and allow relationships to develop over time.
This potentially transforms an isolated transaction into a network.
A buyer can become a repeat customer.
A seller can become an intermediary.
An intermediary can connect several suppliers.
A group can become a marketplace.
And a marketplace can become a trafficking network.
6. A Documented Leopard Connection
The online trade is not simply about generic wildlife.
In June 2026, Bellingcat documented a Myanmar-based trader operating across Facebook, TikTok, WeChat and YouTube.
The investigation identified references to the sale of products derived from numerous protected species, including leopards, tigers, rhinos, elephants, pangolins, bears and otters.
The trader operated multiple Facebook profiles and a Facebook group with nearly 1,000 members and used coded terminology, abbreviations and animal emojis to describe wildlife products.
Bellingcat also documented advertisements referring specifically to leopard skins alongside other wildlife products.
The investigation was based on open-source evidence, including social media posts, visible transactions and shipping-related material. Bellingcat cautioned that it could not independently verify the authenticity or composition of every wildlife product advertised.
Nevertheless, the case provides a concrete example of the way multiple species and commodities can appear within the same digital trafficking environment.
The commodity changes.
The infrastructure can remain.
7. Digital Communication: Beyond the Advertisement
The digital wildlife trade is not confined to public sales posts.
Private and encrypted communication can potentially become part of the operational chain.
A September 2026 investigation by Nepal News documented a rhino-poaching case in Chitwan in which suspects reportedly used WhatsApp to establish contact with an Indian group, arrange weapons and coordinate the planned operation.
The reported planning period extended over several months.
A second Nepal News report following the first General Assembly of the South Asia Wildlife Enforcement Network (SAWEN) in Kathmandu highlighted concerns about the use of encrypted applications, cryptocurrency, coded language and other digital tools in wildlife crime.
The significance is clear:
A digital message does not necessarily represent a sale. It may represent part of the preparation for a physical crime.
This is why digital wildlife intelligence cannot be restricted to monitoring advertisements.
8. Digital Finance
The physical movement of wildlife may still require vehicles, couriers, border crossings and conventional logistics.
The financial transaction can increasingly take place elsewhere.
Digital payments and cryptocurrency can potentially reduce the need for direct contact between buyer and seller and create additional layers between the transaction and the physical movement of wildlife.
The use of cryptocurrency in wildlife trafficking has been highlighted in recent South Asian reporting and in investigations into online trafficking networks.
However, the available evidence does not justify treating cryptocurrency as synonymous with wildlife trafficking.
The broader intelligence point is more important:
Digital communication, digital payment and physical delivery can form parts of the same trafficking transaction without occurring in the same place.
9. Digital Deception
Traffickers adapt.
Wildlife products may be advertised using:
— coded words
— abbreviations
— emojis
— misspellings
— local slang
— deliberately vague descriptions
— alternative languages
— images without identifying text
The Bellingcat investigation documented several examples of this approach, including the use of coded Chinese terminology and animal emojis to describe protected wildlife products.
More recently, conservationists in Nepal have raised concerns about the use of AI-generated images and videos to advertise wildlife and wildlife products.
This introduces a further challenge.
An investigator may increasingly need to establish whether an image:
— depicts the animal claimed
— depicts a real animal
— is current
— originated with the seller
— has been reused from another case
— has been manipulated
— or has been generated artificially
The digital image can no longer automatically be treated as evidence of what it appears to show.
10. The Consumer Remains Part of the System
Technology does not create the desire for wildlife.
People create demand.
The digital environment can, however, change the distance between desire and acquisition.
Recent behavioural research into illegal online wildlife consumption found that consumers could simultaneously value nature and participate in illegal trade.
The study identified factors including desire, price, accessibility, information asymmetry and the ability of consumers to justify or minimise their behaviour.
This evidence comes from illegal succulent imports rather than leopard trafficking and should therefore be treated as a behavioural lens, not as direct evidence about leopard consumers.
The broader question is nevertheless important:
What happens when a wild animal is encountered not as a living being in an ecosystem, but as a photograph, commodity or desirable object on a screen?
The ecological consequences can become psychologically remote.
A leopard becomes a skin.
A claw becomes an ornament.
A tooth becomes a possession.
An animal becomes a product listing.
The digital marketplace can therefore create not only physical distance from the source of a wildlife product, but potentially psychological distance from the animal itself.
This is an important area for continued research.
11. The Digital Marketplace Does Not Replace the Killing
This point must never be lost.
Behind every leopard skin is a leopard.
Behind every set of claws is a leopard.
Behind every collection of teeth is a leopard.
Behind every bag of bones is a leopard.
The digital marketplace can conceal that reality.
It can make the transaction appear clean, distant and commercial.
But the physical chain remains.
Somebody must locate the animal.
Somebody must kill or capture it.
Somebody must process it.
Somebody must move the resulting material.
Somebody must arrange the transaction.
Somebody must receive the money.
Somebody ultimately benefits.
This is why Blood of the Leopard continues to follow the principle:
Don’t stop at the seizure. Follow the chain.
The digital environment may provide another way to follow that chain.
12. The Intelligence Opportunity
The same digital environment that facilitates wildlife crime can also provide intelligence.
Open-source monitoring can identify:
— recurring sellers
— aliases and account relationships
— coded terminology
— repeated images
— species and body-part patterns
— prices and changes in pricing
— geographic references
— communication pathways
— links between public advertisements and private groups
— connections between apparently separate accounts
potential relationships between online activity and physical seizures
The objective should not be to collect advertisements simply to demonstrate that wildlife is being sold online.
The objective is to understand the network behind the advertisement.
An advertisement may be a fragment of a much larger chain.
A photograph may connect two accounts.
A repeated phrase may connect two regions.
A payment mechanism may connect a seller to an intermediary.
A seizure may provide physical evidence that confirms or challenges what was observed online.
This is where digital intelligence becomes more than surveillance.
It becomes network understanding.
13. From Observation to Assessment
For Mission Leopard, the emerging intelligence model is:
OBSERVE → CONNECT → ASSESS → PREVENT
OBSERVE
Identify wildlife-related activity across relevant digital environments.
CONNECT
Identify relationships between accounts, people, commodities, locations and events.
ASSESS
Determine what the evidence actually indicates, distinguish confirmed information from reported claims and intelligence leads, and identify patterns requiring further investigation.
PREVENT
Where appropriate and lawful, provide relevant intelligence to competent authorities and conservation partners.
This approach does not treat every online wildlife advertisement as proof of an organised criminal network.
It seeks to understand the evidence before drawing conclusions.
14. The Meta Accountability Question
Meta is not the only technology company whose platforms can be exploited by wildlife traffickers.
Nor is every wildlife-trafficking post evidence of deliberate corporate participation in the crime.
But Meta’s scale creates a particular responsibility.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and operates systems capable of processing enormous volumes of content, identifying patterns and detecting prohibited activity.
Meta has publicly stated that it uses automated and human systems to enforce its policies and has announced increasingly sophisticated AI-based enforcement capabilities. It has also demonstrated through other areas of online crime that it can work with law enforcement to identify and disrupt organised criminal networks.
At the same time, independent investigations continue to document substantial wildlife trafficking activity on its platforms.
That contradiction requires scrutiny.
The question is no longer simply:
Can Meta remove individual wildlife-trafficking posts?
It is:
Can Meta identify and disrupt the networks, recommendation pathways, repeat offenders and commercial mechanisms that allow illegal wildlife trade to persist on its platforms?
And where credible evidence indicates that platform systems may amplify or monetise such activity, the question becomes more serious still.
Platform accountability must extend beyond removing individual posts.
It must address the systems through which illegal activity is discovered, connected, amplified and potentially rewarded.
15. The Wider South Asian Picture
Nepal provides an important regional example of the changing relationship between wildlife crime and digital technology.
Recent reporting from Nepal has described the use of WhatsApp, social media, TikTok, private groups and digital payments in wildlife crime investigations.
The first SAWEN General Assembly in Kathmandu in September 2026 also placed digital wildlife crime and cross-border cooperation among the emerging regional concerns.
This is particularly relevant to leopard conservation.
Leopard trafficking does not respect national borders.
The animal may be killed in one country, processed in another, transported through a third and ultimately sold to a consumer somewhere else.
The digital transaction may occur in a completely different geography.
Digital geography and physical geography are no longer necessarily the same.
This creates a major challenge for enforcement — but also a major intelligence opportunity.
16. A Changing Threat
The online wildlife trade is evolving rapidly.
The platforms will change.
The language will change.
The payment systems will change.
The methods of concealment will change.
Artificial intelligence will change the information environment again.
But the underlying drivers remain familiar:
demand, profit, opportunity and weak deterrence.
The internet has not created these drivers.
It has made it possible for them to operate with greater speed, reach and connectivity.
The threat therefore needs to be understood not as an online problem separate from wildlife crime, but as an increasingly important digital layer of the global wildlife-trafficking system.
For leopards, this matters because the same digital infrastructure can connect demand for a skin, a claw, a tooth or a bone to the physical killing of an animal thousands of kilometres away.
Lead Assessment
HIGH — DEVELOPING
The evidence indicates that digital platforms are becoming an increasingly important operating layer within the global illegal wildlife trade. They facilitate not only advertising and sales, but potentially recruitment, communication, coordination, negotiation, payment and the development of trafficking networks.
Facebook is particularly significant. Large-scale monitoring has identified it as the dominant platform in detected online wildlife-trade activity, while independent investigations have documented persistent trafficking of protected wildlife through Meta’s platforms. Investigators have also raised specific concerns about recommendation systems and content monetisation potentially amplifying or financially rewarding trafficking activity. These allegations require continued scrutiny and should be distinguished from independently established facts.
For leopard conservation, the significance extends beyond individual advertisements. Digital activity can provide intelligence about demand, sellers, intermediaries, networks, routes and emerging commodities. When connected carefully with seizure data, field intelligence, forensic evidence and other sources, online activity may help reveal parts of the trafficking chain that remain invisible in conventional enforcement statistics.
The central intelligence assessment is therefore that the online wildlife trade should no longer be treated simply as an electronic marketplace. It should be understood as a developing digital component of the wider physical trafficking system.
The leopard is still killed in the real world.
The question is increasingly how much of the chain leading to that killing is now being built on a screen.
Blood of the Leopard is Mission Leopard’s living intelligence publication. This section is a developing assessment and will be updated as new research, investigations, enforcement actions, platform policies and intelligence become available.
Core principle: Let evidence dictate the narrative.
