Assessing the extent and nature of wildlife trade on the dark web.
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology August 1, 2016 Joseph R Harrison, David L Roberts, Julio Hernandez-Castro 110 citations
The illegal wildlife trade is increasingly moving online, raising fears it will migrate to the dark web to avoid detection. To establish a baseline, researchers archived 9,852 dark web posts and searched them using 121 keywords linked to illegal wildlife trade, including 30 keywords for elephant ivory. Only four keywords produced hits, and just one post—discussing the sale of Echinopsis pachanoi (San Pedro cactus), a plant with hallucinogenic properties—was potentially linked to illegal wildlife trade. This negligible dark web activity compared to the open trade on the surface web suggests that surface web enforcement against illegal wildlife trade remains insufficient.