You're listening to a stage talk titled Tracking the Traffickers. This week, Bellingcat researcher Fuca Postma joined us on stage. Fuca is known for finding things online that shouldn't be there, from exposing flashcard apps that were leaking highly confidential locations of nuclear weapons, to highlighting clues that a woman claiming to offer evacuation flights out of Iranian missile flight paths to major newspapers may be completely
AI -generated. In recent years, he's turned his talent to finding these digital trails to looking into animal welfare. He's carried out investigations into influencers showcasing lion cubs on their YouTube and Instagram to profile selling endangered species to customers on Facebook and TikTok. In this talk, he speaks on how he carried out these investigations and what methods you can take to report on animal abuse. You can find links to all the resources mentioned in the talk
in the podcast description. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Ma, on Thursday, the 2nd of April, 2026, in the Bellicat Discord server. Welcome to a new stage talk. Today's conversation dives into the hidden world of online wildlife trafficking and how it's evolving in plain sight on mainstream platforms. A recent investigation by Usa Billingcat uncovered networks of traders using coded language inside Facebook groups to openly sell protected and endangered animals,
often to tens of thousands of members. Despite platform policies banning animal sales, these communities have persisted for years and evaded detection until now. The reporting traces how these networks operate, how sellers mask illegal activity, and how multiple accounts lead back to a single broker coordinating sales across
borders. To unpack how this works and what it means for tech platform moderation, conservation efforts, and digital investigations into environmental harms, I'm joined by my colleague, Fuka Postma. He's also the researcher behind this investigation. Carried out, by the way, with the excellent environmental
investigations outlet, Monga Bay. Before we start, and before I pass it over to Fuca, a short reminder that you can place your questions in the chat, accessible in the right -hand corner of your screen. But please remember that this is being audio recorded for the podcast. So if you want to keep your Discord username private, please mention that in your question. Okay. Fuca, I will shut up and the stage is yours. Thank you
very much. So I'll start off by setting the scene and our broader interest in investigating wildlife issues online and why I think Bellingcat and open source investigators can play a crucial role in trying to prevent or stop this kind of stuff happening. So if we think about wildlife issues online, it's always broader than people think. You have the trait, which we'll discuss in a bit, but there's also all types of abuse going on. Farming, poaching, people who collect
rare bats for taxidermy or gorilla skulls. People who think specific animals have medicinal properties when you consume them. Or there are communities who think certain owls represent witchery and so they should be exterminated or chased away once you come across them. So it's a large scale issue that you can approach from many angles. But what the research shows is that most of this place where animals get traded takes place on Facebook. So that's where a lot of this stuff
can be found. Even with different platforms around, even with knowing that there are local shops or whatever, like every country has their own specific sort of like commercial website, right? Still Facebook is very much a large source for wildlife issues, especially once you delve into the illegal wildlife trade. And so you already said it, there are measures that Facebook takes to sort of combat this issue. But it's always an evolving scene and illegal wildlife traders
know this. So for example, even years ago, I came across posts which clearly showed cheetah cubs. in the Middle East in a small basket. And already back then people were wise enough to never use the word cheetah and buy or sell in the same post. The comments would ask, is it for sale or are you selling it? And the seller would say it's sold, it's sold, it's sold. And no one would say the word cheetah specifically.
Now you can still often... Not often, but if you're lucky, find people in groups who are not smart enough to avoid doing this. But by and large, if a wildlife trader is successful and has built up a reputation online, you'll find that they are very good at avoiding certain types of language. And that makes it a bit more difficult to detect. You'll also see that they use certain emojis, for example, because you can't really search Facebook with emojis. Or they will try
to edit the photo. So the animal on it is not easily recognizable, I guess, to an algorithm, but humans can still see what they mean. The same goes for these groups that are the topic of this latest investigation. A lot of these groups were called animal adoption. If they mentioned a species, they would mention a species that is legal to trade in, but is very adjacent to more illegal wildlife trade. So for example, they would use group names that focus on sievats.
And, uh, they are, I mean, more rare than, than your average animal, uh, more uncommon. Um, and they draw a certain crowds, right? Um, and in those groups, you would find more and more rare and specific, uh, species that were not meant
to be, uh, sold at all. Um, and that, that language that they use to avoid immediate detection is something that reminds me of previous investigations where animal traders, illegal wildlife traders in the Middle East, they would just say they have a private zoo or they would have an animal rescue. And that's their reason why they show off animals at the profile and why they hold them. And then if you duck just a little bit further, you can immediately see now they're
buying and selling these species. That being said, you can still use keywords to find this kind of posts, these groups. You just have to go through a couple of steps and put yourself in the context that they themselves live in. So obviously a language barrier, you need to switch to Bahasa Indonesian in this case, but then also the dealers figure out their own sort of colloquial language, type of lingo that takes place once you deal with certain material long
enough. So a buffy fish owl, for example, becomes just a buffy. Now, if I see something that's just called a buffy or you search for a buffy, you For those older amongst us, you might end up with Buffy the vampire slayer. But in the right context, you get a certain type of owl that people were very interested in, right? So these keywords, even though these sensors like... You have the sensors, you have the traders rotating
around the sensors. If you take the effort to figure out the keywords, you might still find those traders and those groups. It just takes a little bit more research ahead of finding material that you're interested in. You can still do this right now if you search, for example, on Telegram, if you're interested in dog fighting, one of these other wildlife issues, or at least animal issues, if you just go to Telegram and you search
for dogs, you're not going to find much. You can search for game dogs, and then you're getting closer to the type of groups that you are interested in. But if you specifically look for APBT, American Pit Bull Terrier, You're going to find all of these accounts and groups that are dedicated often to dog fighting because the, the American pit bull terrier is one of the favorites that they use. They use that short harm, that acronym for that dog. And that's sort of like commonly
known in that community. Um, so that's what I mean, like you need to sort of, uh, get in there, um, or at least do some research and find those other ways. in which you can track these people. So one interesting aspect to this research that we did is finding out the admins of these groups. So sometimes when you read about the amount of Facebook posts that contain illegal advertisements on wildlife, it always feels hopeless. Like the numbers are in the thousands, tens of thousands.
And if you're in this group, you see like hundreds of posts every week, right? And just the scale is sort of overwhelming because it might just mix in with legal trade. And none of us are an expert on every species. So you might see like a dozen adverts for others. And some others you can trade in and some others you can't trade in. Uh, but you have to sort of be able to determine that, but good luck if you're not an author expert,
right? So, uh, for this research, uh, it was, I guess for the first time that I properly made use of AI as well. And I know this is, um, already, uh, dangerous to go in because every time you refer to AI, immediately people think, oh, hallucinations. uh, you know, double check your work. And it's true, you need, you need to double check your work, but it can still speed up your work, even
accounting for the double checking. Um, so, um, if, if I had such a large volume of posts, um, and you start off with some animals that you learn to recognize, like I now know what a buffy owl looks like and sort of what otter is protected and which ones, uh, aren't. But if you prepare an environment, a project or a notebook or whatever your LLM or your AI offers, where you can sort of prepare the stage. You throw in documents related to the specific laws of that country.
You tell it that you want the... You needed to check the IUCN listing for the species. And then quickly, sorry, provide feedback on whatever photo or name of an animal you throw in there. You are able to deal with a large volume of animals much more faster. And you learn a lot this way as well, especially if you, you know, do what you need to do, which is double check whatever the LLM is. providing you. So you're in this
group that is hiding under adopt an animal. You see a large volume of posts and you're using AI to sort of like quickly learn more and more about, okay, which animals are we looking at? Which ones should I pay extra attention to? And then once in a while you'll probably find adverts that contain animals that are protected or vulnerable and endangered or both, both meaning endangered and protected. Um, and that's where the digging starts, right? Um, it already says something
about the group, obviously. Um, but you want to start with the people who are actually, actually sending those adverts into the group to begin with. And more often than not, you'll end up with a locked Facebook profile. Which sucks, but it's not the end of the world. Because you can search old Facebook profiles, or you can search locked Facebook profiles for older posts,
sorry. If you don't know how to do this, if you ever end up in a locked Facebook profile, there's three dots on the right hand side and you can do search. And you have to fill in a keyword. And depending on if they've ever used that keyword, you might get results. suddenly you might see posts that they posted that you were not able
to see when you just visited their profile. And the good thing about this is that if you visited their, or if you came across their adverts, you probably have some indication of the language that they might be using to send out ads into groups. So in this case, I came across several locked Facebook profiles through advertisements. And for example, one, I only had an advertisement for Buffy Fish Owl. And so I just go to the profile, profile's locked, it's empty, but I do this thing
where you open up the search button. Pro tip, if the search button doesn't appear, you can still make it appear through a bookmark. I'm not going to explain this right now, but I'm happy to in the Discord. But yeah, just so you know. So you can search the looked Facebook profile, right? I have the adverts. I search for Buffy and suddenly I see where else this person has
placed this Buffy advert. You might also see the posts that don't just contain Buffy, but maybe their phone number or maybe a different species that they've also been selling at a different time. It does not matter in particular if the advertisement is years old. Um, I mean, the animal will be, will be gone probably. Uh, but for research, if you, even if you have an advert that is really old, I still see people comment on adverts that are like two years old, um, just to make the
connection with the seller. And I mean, there's all kinds of information you can gather from this, right? Who are the people who are responding to the adverts? Who are people who are liking the adverts? What are they up to? So all the posts are interesting, not just because you have those connections, but also because they might lead you to different groups, more information, other keywords that that user has been using
in their adverts. And slowly but surely you can unravel an identity behind the locked Facebook profile. In this story, once I started doing this, I noticed that there was a collection of profiles that were using the same keywords, the same like buffy fish owl. They will use WC, WildCod or BC, which is bred in captivity. WildCod is usually more worse and it's like the laws are more stringent when it's wild caught. And yeah, I started noticing that they posted the same
kind of stuff. And they also, many of them had admin roles or moderator roles in several of these groups that I kept running into. And here's where it becomes a bit more typical Bellingcat investigation, where you look at the photos and you start to... understand I'm looking at the same kind of interior. From the interior, eventually I saw a poster in the background that led me
to a specific shop. I also started noticing that, you know, as they hold the animal to photograph, they photographed part of their wrist and they had a nice mole on that wrist. And so even though they were photographing different animals in different positions, sometimes different interiors, They all showed the same exact model on the same
wrist. And so I started thinking, oh, wait, are all these different profiles, if we have different admin roles and moderator roles in different groups, they appear to come from one person and the phone number also started to point to one person. Yeah. And so with the geolocation, I eventually figured out, okay, this is a store that they're connected to. And in the story, you see this pet shop. It's a very small pet
shop in Indonesia near Jakarta. And we decided to partner up with Mongabay, which is a great outlet, great environmental focused outlet that decided to help us out. And they had someone visit that store. Saw Javan Kugal, which is a protected species there. And gave us more information to work off. So it turns out that the person that I came across from all these different profiles is a broker who hangs out at that shop. And that makes sense if you see the shop, it's relatively
small. But the way this usually works. uh, is a broker is like dedicated to connecting people who source these animals, who sell animals and people who want to buy these animals. Um, and they make sort of these essential nodes in, in networks. Um, it's very rare for, for example, someone who, um, works in, um, some remote area, um, like a farmer or a, uh, let's say woodcutter. They might come across a rare species like out
there in nature. It's rare for those people to immediately go to Facebook and like start trying to sell whatever they found. Usually it's they know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy and that guy knows the broker who has a large network and is able to make the trade for you and gets a portion of the profit. And so in this case, I suspect they were helping out that pet shop
just connect to a wider audience. We didn't go as far as trying to figure out where the pet shop sourced their animals because like I said, it might very well be that they just have some guy on WhatsApp who came across this rare bird in their backyard or on the farm or whatever.
The good thing about being able to identify one of sort of these essential nodes in a network is that Yeah, once you've identified the person and you can demonstrate that they are selling protected species themselves and facilitating it for a very large portion of this wildlife trade online, like the groups that they had an admin or moderator role in together had like 70 ,000 people in them. And because we reach out to Meta and we ask questions, Meta eventually
takes down these groups and those accounts. And that matters. That matters a lot. Like I said, these accounts, their history also matters, right? You can't just make a new account and a new group. I mean, they can, but it will never have the same weight of groups that have been online for five years or more. where they have demonstrated that they are authentic sellers that can be trusted. Where old adverts still demonstrate the types of animals that they might be able to fetch for
you or have on offer. So I consider this a more successful impact than just trying to take down posts. And on top of that, It also I think is somewhat inspiring to think that yes, there are thousands of these posts and a lot of groups, but apparently if you manage to find the right person and identify them, you can take seven of these groups, nine of these groups. I need to check my own work now. I think it was nine even. Yeah, some smaller groups, nine groups
now. Yeah, just by identifying one. crucial guy, you take down a very large portion of this community that is involved in illegal wildlife trade near Jakarta. And, you know, as it's a Bellingcat article, hopefully demonstrate to you, all of you, how you can do the same, how you can search these profiles, how you can make connections and hopefully identify the people who are doing this. Let's see, do I have any other thoughts on this? We'll just open it up for questions.
What do you think Charlotte? It sounds good to me. We already have quite a few coming through. I will reshare the article link as well while I'm here, just in case people want to look through. Although I did put the image of the mole in the chat as you were talking about it. In terms of discovery, Saiba asks, are most of these Facebook posts public or do you likely need to join them to see the chats? And there's been discussion in the chat about how you might be able to kind
of make your way into these spaces. Perhaps as an addition to that, you could also talk about kind of where we as researchers draw the line in terms of infiltrating Facebook groups or... private Facebook pages as you were talking about earlier. So these are fairly large groups and they might be set to private, but you can join them usually very easily. Because I'm interested in the topic, I just mass join whatever groups even remotely suggest that they're interested.
And then once you do a search on Facebook, if you're in those groups, you search those groups as well, right? Um, so it makes it that, that easier. Uh, that's, that's what my approach has been to, um, yeah, search for these groups, especially once they say adoption and they have like, uh, tens of thousands of, of people in them. And then, uh, I guess if you want to get more accurate and find the specific groups, it's always worth to One, check the groups that, like I said, these
dealers are in. So once you see an advert in like a broad general group that interests you, find the person, investigate them a little bit and see if you can find your posts in different groups. But also sometimes stuff gets reshared from one group to another. And then that's a useful way of, you know, finding out multiple groups. So yeah, it's not... that difficult to
find these groups in my experience. Um, we do draw the line at talking to people and, you know, joining very specific, uh, private groups where you need to engage in a discussion with the admin in order to, uh, get into the group. Okay. Uh, so that's just, uh, where we at Bellingcat draw the line. I use sub puppets to, to join large groups. Um, But I don't just step into a very private group or talk to these people. Yeah.
Yeah. Really important. Cybert wrote in the chat, all Bellingcat supporters are getting ready to descend upon Facebook and nab a bunch of these brokers. In regards to privacy, as we're talking about it, before we move on to any other questions, you mentioned that MongoBay as part of their collaboration kind of went on the ground and looked to see if they could find the location. How did they control that situation? Did they
approach the individual? Where was their role in this and can you explain a little bit further how they protected themselves as well on the ground? Yeah, so they do a more traditional style of journalism where they just visited the store as a customer, asked some questions, took some photos. And then later on, for the right of reply, they called the people as well. We found phone numbers, obviously. We visited and said, we're working on an article where journalists, what
do you have to say about our findings? So obviously a bit further than we can go. Very interesting form of journalism, but a very helpful one here also in this story. Yeah, those underground jailers can often give you a little bit more context than you can find online. Somebody in the chat's put, that's very good advice. Fuca safety is paramount and exposure to some things is not desired. And somebody else has put a little resource for sock puppets accounts, if you're not familiar
with what they are. Obviously, be very, very careful. If you are creating sockpocket accounts to join places, make sure that what you're doing is in the public interest and make sure that you're being safe online using VPNs and all of that stuff. There's loads of resources in hashtag infosec in this server that will help you with that and in tools and sites. We had a question earlier about if you'd applied these techniques
to other nations other than Indonesia. What I mentioned in your intro is that you've actually been covering this for a little bit. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other investigations on similar communities that you found doing similar activities? Yeah, sure. I've done this for Malaysia, sorry, and for Dubai as well. And there's some side projects that take place in different contexts as well. So it's very replicable. The advice applies to different regions as well. It's not
Indonesia specific. In all of these contexts, they tried to avoid sensors in the same way. In Malaysia, you found the trafficker on TikTok, correct? And in Dubai was Instagram, right? So these are across platforms as well that you'll find in these. In Dubai, it was actually spotting the animals in the background of influencer videos. Is that correct? Yes. Yeah, that's true. You'll see that if they are large enough, this will end up a multi -platform investigation, but it's
not always. forward for the way we publish the story. It's not always useful to take you through every platform because it's usually very much the same. So in this, in the Indonesia story, I discussed Facebook, but they also have, for example, a presence on TikTok. And with the Dubai story, we focus very much on Instagram, but you could also find posts on Facebook. I like Facebook
because it's... It usually provides you a bit more information and it's a bit more easier to research in my experience than TikTok or Instagram. But yeah, it ends up being, even if the story ends up being focusing on the line of inquiry on one platform. Usually on the backside, you'll find that we uncover multiple platforms and the same behavior happening in different places.
And you mentioned that you were searching in Indonesian for this particular investigation, the recent one that you were just talking about. Dars has asked, with Facebook being particularly prominent in the Indo -Pacific, these groups of thousands of members, do you find that the buyers are prominently domestic or have you observed transnational trade? A bit of both. So the scale is large enough that you're getting inundated
with more domestic trades, it feels like. But then I wasn't surprised when I saw some people ask for international transfers or trades. They will sometimes also openly advertise with saying, no, we can ship this anywhere in the world. So yeah, a lot of local trade, but not excluding international trade. How far do you go when you're trying to map out these networks? Like, do you often try to, you mentioned you can see, you know, who's commenting for a long period of time.
He's repeatedly asking for prices. Have you ever taken that extra step and looked at the buyers, not just the sellers? Or is that kind of taking it a step too far in terms of being able to kind of see impact from the investigation? Yeah, it depends on, um, It's almost a case -by -case scenario. If I get in the sense that the buyer is not just a one -off, but somehow has their own business going on, then it becomes a lot
more interesting, obviously. Let's see, I've done some investigations that are still sort of ongoing where the buyers also matter, but I can't talk too much about that. Yeah, I can't say anything else, but it's a case -by -case scenario. Most of the times I leave the buyer, I want to say by the wayside, it's yeah, not the most interesting part of the investigation because the bad side is the supply side in this case, right? So yeah, this is not a very fulfilling
answer. I know. Uh, but for me, the, the Stellars and figuring out part of the supply chain, uh, is the most interesting aspect. You're keeping us on tender hooks. I like it. Sumi said something related to this, actually. They've just commented, do these groups have overlap with normal trade groups while doing business with captive exotic animals? Or are they staying closed as possible? What's their general tactic? Do they look for
outreach, for example? Are you seeing them outreaching on other kind of... wildlife related groups or is it all happening within these groups? They got enough audience already looking for trade. Yeah, I want to say that, and it really depends on the species. There is a crossover where you have dedicated communities that are sort of open and for example, show themselves as hobbyists, just discussing their favorite wildlife or favorite
species. And then you'll find that some people are saying that they have one for sale, but people should reach out to them privately. And I've seen indications where I'll mention this case. It was on MorphMarkets, which is a popular US focused, I think, reptile and snakes sort of great place online, marketplace online. In there was an advert for a Simalia bouleni, which is, it's a snake. If you see the snake, it's a beautiful snake. It has sort of like a rainbow shimmer.
But it was sold in the United Kingdom and it was sold as one that is labeled wild cult. So we're talking about like, morph market is like an official business, right? It's not some shady group. dedicated space for all of these hobbyists. So a wild god, Simalia Buleni, which according to the description was sold in the UK. They said it was captive for a number amount of years.
And if you know a bit about how this trade is supposed to work, Simalia Buleni, that specific snake, only can be found on Papua New Guinea. I believe in a mountain range. It likes to live and mate quite high above sea level. And in theory, it can only be exported by two countries, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, due to its endemic sort
of like nature in those locations. And because all of this trade is now regulated by CITES, If someone tells me this snake is wild caught and I got it nine years ago, I should be able to go to CITES and see did any of these snakes end up in the country that you say where you're at from those places. And I couldn't find any matching records, which means that either it happened under the books without permits or the seller is lying about it being wild caught, which
can also happen. But this is a rare snake, which doesn't breed easily. It takes some effort to do this kind of investigation. I should explain to you, I'm happy to explain to you how you can do this. It's not too difficult, but you do need to go to CITES trade database, fill in the species and the country and the years, and then see, are there any matching permits? And there weren't
any. All of this to say, Definitely, and depending on these specific, highly specific species, you'll find that the hobbyist communities also do have some negative influences there from people who are trying to sell them. In those discussion groups, I've also seen some general resistance against regulating the trade. The argument that hobbyists usually put forward is saying, no, we take great care of these animals. We try to breed them and in breeding them, we help stop
them from going extinct. Which, you know, if I follow experts advice and they say, no, if you want to stop these animals from going extinct, especially in the wild, you just need to stop these poachers from taking them. And these snakes can go for like $10 ,000 a piece. which, uh, you know, for someone living in these more remote areas, there's an incredible, uh, amounts of
money. Um, so yeah, if the question is, are these, these sort of like open legal spaces, uh, to do sometimes interject with the illegal trade, then yeah. I wonder if you could put the link to that site that you mentioned in the chat, because I'm sure people would love to explore
that. Just on overlap in terms of communities, a comment earlier when you were talking about the codes and the colloquial nicknames of species, somebody put in the chat that most taxonomists raise some colloquial nicknames of species too. Although these nicknames are not intended for search blending, we're just doing it too because we are lazy. So sometimes there are innocent reasons as to why these terms or these animals are appearing in these spaces, but it's really
good to understand the overlap. We had questions earlier talking about what to do if you come across these pages and you're pretty sure that what they're doing is illegal. You've been talking about Indonesia, Malaysia, Dubai. If you don't live in those countries, do you have jurisdiction to report it? How does it work and are the laws different in different countries for this kind of activity? Definitely. So there are always three laws that I try to keep in mind. There's
the local laws. There's whatever Facebook's rules or TikTok rules or whatever say. And then once you get a sense that it's international trade, CITES also comes into play. So CITES is the regulatory framework for any international trade for animals. So if you come across something and you want to do more, if you want to investigate, then go through these steps. Facebook, I think in general has a rule against selling or buying
animals, which is not really enforced. Then there's like your local laws in the local context, which is tricky because often what happens is that template Dubai, they will have strict regulations, but then they will say, unless you have a permit, unless you have a permit. And then how can you demonstrate that someone has or does not have a permit, right? It's not something that they
might post on Facebook. So that's tricky. And so then what I tried to focus on is the animal that we're looking at in any way vulnerable or endangered is the species in decline and is the purpose that they are being sold for. the pet trade, is that contributing? And for me, that's what makes it interesting enough to go after. Okay. Regardless of the local laws. And you'll find that usually if the species is in decline,
it should be protected. For example, Indonesia does have laws on this, it's just often a matter of capacity for law enforcement. And yeah, if you really want to make work of it, you can go out there and start or take the link of that post and send it to local wildlife organizations, to authorities, flag it for meta. Or if you're really into open source investigations, do what I do and try to uncover identities and see how far the rabbit hole goes. And then write up an
article and send it to us. And then hopefully we can have a larger impact and take down a larger network. I love that you suggested that. And if you do want to pitch an investigation to us, it's submissions at billingcat .com and you can find details. How's the submit? on our website under contact. Or, you know, you can just ping Fuka in here in the environment channel, which I shared earlier in the chat. Sumi says, thanks
for that answer. I wondered because I met few regulated cases on open markets like public exchanges with exotic animals. Some doesn't need to be CITES, but also GMO related animals. I have seen that. Note they should be strongly regulated in Europe. The thing is some type of folks craving for anything that's rare and it really supports general will to offer this kind of stock. We had a question earlier about CITES actually, is there recourse available with the domain administrators
there? If it's a legitimate focusing marketplace, should there be some form of accountability to remove illegal and despicable content? Yes, there could also be some form of accountability. That's actually a good question, I don't have an answer to that. Maybe a way forward if you notice something. People are also saying public name and shame can be a good tactic, but also noting that it can quickly become hazardous to your health as
well. BJ Mack asked earlier, Is Foukesh searching in non -Latin scripts and are the traders more brazen in the languages that content checkers are less familiar with? Yes. I am searching also in non -Latin scripts and I do feel that the posts that we come across, people who have taken some steps to use very local colloquial language or lingo, feel more brazen, more confident to talk openly. So they do consider it a form of privacy to retreat into this sort of non -standard
or difficult to track language. Do you think there's things that moderate a platform? platforms, social platforms could do more of. Do you think their moderation systems, for example, the AI moderation tools are capable of capturing this coded language? Or do you think, do you think there's anything more that they could be doing than they're currently doing? Yes, easily. So one of the issues I have with people going out there and flagging and reporting stuff for Meta.
is that you're basically doing matters work, right? You're becoming a content moderator for them. And people do this out of a passion and out of an interest to stop illegal wildlife trade. But honestly, with how many billion they spend on the metaverse and are now on AI. If I, as a non -Bahasan Indonesian speaker can recognize that a post is advertising an animal, not just, you know, With the description, but people in the comments, um, people repeatedly posting,
uh, this animal, people discussing price. Uh, I can't help but think that, and, uh, uh, a lightweight model, AI model should be able to catch this and flag this. Um, yeah. So I am not letting metal off here. without any blame. I think they can do a lot better. There's your pull quote from this episode. Thanks Sabine, so honest there. And yeah, I think it's interesting, like how prevalent this kind of trade is on these platforms. In regards to that, do you have any idea how...
How big, how significant this online trafficking is compared to more traditional trafficking routes today? Have you spoken to any people in the conservation in terms of how the volume of endangered protected species being moved in this way, the impact online trading can have on conservation efforts? Yeah, so I mean, the illegal wildlife trade is one of the biggest sort of prime financial flows
on the planet. And because it's also one of the lowest priorities, it feels like sometimes you can not easily post a large photo of, you know, your bags of drugs or a stash of weapons. without it drawing some interest. But animals, even rare species, sure go ahead. And one of the reasons is it's a capacity issue because you need to know a lot about all kinds of species. So for example, I think I mentioned this in the beginning, but even ants can be trafficked, right? Or the
eggs of birds or whatever. uh, the paste made out of tigers. Um, and it's, it's tricky because once it, especially if an animal is turned into a different product, like, like tiger paste or tiger wine, um, determining that it actually came from a tiger requires a lot more, uh, effort than, you know, uh, detecting drugs or detecting, uh, weapons. And the same goes for, you know, if you see a photo of this kind of stuff, um, So it's a very, very large illegal financial
flow that is taking place. It has a very large online presence. And at the same time, the capacity or sometimes maybe even the interest to completely stop this is very low. So there's a lot of good work to be done for open source investigators in this field. It just takes more people having a look at this kind of stuff. So if you have a particular passion for a particular species, or you want to develop one, maybe you have a love for ants, please go out there and search
and see what's going on. That would be great. There's your call to action right there. On that, there's a question in, and by the way, we've only got 10 minutes left, so we've only got time for a few more questions. There was a question just before you said that about, there's always a lot of interest on wildlife trafficking of cute animals. How about the non -cute ones? Would there be less visual evidence about their illegal trade? Do you find that to do the traffickers?
really prioritize cute looking animals in their adverts in comparison to the not as cute animals. Yeah, I think so. I mean, they definitely draw more attention. And I think with that, the price also goes up and so the interest in dealing in the animal. So like I said, this Buleni snake, I don't think a lot of people would have taken an interest or the price would be as high if it wasn't gorgeous to look at snake. So that
matters. You'll often see that these species that are described as rare, it becomes sort of like a self -fulfilling prophecy where hobbyists call it rare. The price shoots up, poachers think, oh, this is rare, I can sell it for a lot of money. go after that animal, making it even more rare. And yeah, we like to think about these big animals like the elephants and the cheetahs
and we should rightfully be concerned. But these smaller species, not smaller species, but the ones that get less interest, we should give them more love as well, because many of them are equally at risk of going extinct. Yeah. No, that's true. Yeah. Like you said. Protect the little guys. Tristan in the comments, who is an old colleague of ours, is putting a really cute ant picture in the chat. Cute being the sarcastic word. Thanks
for that. Just to kind of wrap up, obviously if there's a few other questions in and we might be able to squeeze them in, but I wanted to ask this. For many forms, for many people, animal abuse and animal trade investigations can be quite a triggering thing to work on. It's one of those things that often gets listed when you're talking to investigators about the things that they're not comfortable working on. So how do you stay sane when doing this type of investigation?
What would be your tips for people who are perhaps thinking about, now you've spoken to us, thinking about delving into this area, how do you keep yourself from going crazy if you're an animal lover yourself? Yeah. So, um, I do, I mean, luckily at Bellacat we, do this in different areas and like it's her daytime job. So we also get support. Um, and I would recommend you if, if someone now has a large passion or an interest to, to
take it very easy. Um, some things you can't unsee, especially if you end up with like, um, the places where animals get abused for fun, uh, or animals are easily chopped up into pieces. Um, It can be very, very triggering and you just need to be aware of this before you enter the space like this. So thank you for asking this question. What drives me more is that it does feel like a very sort of important undertaking. So we see these species going in the, in the
clown, we see a species going extinct. And you see the direct cause of this in Facebook groups. So on the one hand, you have this sort of like risk that you end up with these horrible images. On the other side, you know what you're doing it for. And it's a very important cause. So for me, that helps me sort of like overcome this
kind of imagery. uh, or the stuff that I see, knowing that it's for a good cause and then seeing those, uh, groups taken down or the profile disappear and, um, you know, uh, law enforcement visiting homes or commenting all the people that we identify. Um, yeah, it, it feels like I'm doing my part and that helps, um, more practically. Think about turning off audio is always a good idea. Grayscaling your screen if you suspect you're going to see
something unpleasant also helps. And taking a lot of good breaks and talking with people about what you're doing. Yeah, we have great articles also on trauma help for those who are dealing with this kind of stuff or think they might encounter this stuff. I highly recommend reading that as well. Yeah, I'm sure one of our mods can helpfully drop our usual article in the chat. Someone's also just put, never watch anything in full screen
is also a great tip. We need to wrap up in a second, but I also wanted to ask very quickly because this is a subject that many people don't... cover very often. Is there any particular organizations that you like to share your work with once it's published for impact? Are there any organizations that like to kind of echo these kinds of investigations that you might want to shout out for people to look at maybe as a good resource or to also kind of send their work to just to amplify it a little
bit further. So obviously Mongabay, I'm so glad we're happy with it. I'm so happy and glad that we're in touch with them. They do great work on a lot of areas and because they're in so many places, they can almost provide the local context, which so often gets overlooked, but can be very important for an investigation. The International Fund for Animal Welfare, I'm a fan of those. Oh, there's so many organizations. Yeah. the Environmental Investigative Agency, EIA, Graphic.
They all do great work in this space. And if you want to get a feel of where to get started or just take an interest in this kind of work, read up on them as well. Amazing tips. And if you don't mind just writing them again in the chat for anybody who is... here and maybe English isn't their first language, that would be super
useful. Thank you so much, Fuka, for today. It's been fascinating, not only learning about the amazing work that you've done in this space, but also kind of the tips and tricks as you go along. You're so good at explaining investigation. processes. So that was really great. I know that Tristan earlier may have shared the bookmarklets tip that you gave. So hopefully people have that as well. But yes, if you want to... Stay in contact
on this subject. We mentioned earlier, if you want to pitch to Bellingcat, you can via submissions at bellingcat .com, or you can chat about this subject in hashtag environment and wildlife in this very Discord server. And I'll make sure that the links to everything that we've talked about are in the description of this podcast. But for now, thank you so much, Fuca, for your time. Have a beautiful weekend, people. Make sure that you take a break after this very heavy
talk. And I will see you in two weeks' time for another stage talk. All right, cool. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for listening to the stage talk. If you'd like to catch a stage talk live... where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bellingcat Discord server by visiting www .discord .gg slash Bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.