Wildlife Trafficking’s Ties to Guns, Drugs and Human Smuggling

Wildlife traffickers are funneling dirty money through the same financial pipelines used for such illicit activity as human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and the illegal sale of weapons around the world, according to new University of Waterloo research cited by CBC News.

The study, led by PhD researcher Michelle Anagnostou, found that the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) exploits a wider web of global organized crime and sophisticated money-laundering operations, and can be linked to arms trafficking, sex trafficking, child abuse, migrant smuggling, organ trafficking, counterfeit and pirated goods, vehicle theft, and narcotics trafficking, among other activity.

What surprised the research team most, Anagnostou said, was how little is known about how IWT syndicates transfer their illicit proceeds across the globe.

“We don’t have the best sense of how these organized crime networks are moving their dirty money internationally,” she told CBC’s The Morning Edition.

Because higher-level organizers “are probably not even touching the product,” enforcement that concentrates on rangers’ arrests of poachers or seizures at border posts risks missing the ringleaders, said told the news outlet. Consequently, investigators should focus on using banking data and financial-intelligence capabilities to follow the money.

The project used “innovative methods of data collection” and leveraged access to law-enforcement and intelligence experts who rarely speak publicly, according to CBC.

Anagnostou told the news organization that the upcoming phase of her research will focus on how to implement anti-money laundering programs to better fight IWT.

“How do we do this better? How do we follow the money, so to speak, and use financial transactions and leverage banks and financial intelligence units to better address this crime and essentially get to these higher up criminal offenders who are really, really making a lot of money?” she said in the report.