Wildlife traders attempting to use the dark web to illegally flog rare and exotic animals are getting flamed by other users, a privacy expert has told Motherboard. Joss Wright, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that during his research on wildlife trade in anonymous marketplaces, he found that traders suggesting sales of live animals are usually met with “vitriol.” While the dark web is no stranger to illegal sales of drugs, porn, and fake IDs , Wright suggested that illegal wildlife trade coming out of countries such as China and Kenya is just not culturally accepted by a majority of dark web users. “They consider drugs as very much a victimless crime, and it’s very much a political standpoint,” said Wright. One user who proposed a sale of tiger cubs as pets was met with remarks such as "this is sick" “One thing I can tell you is that when I did look through the forums for evidence of wildlife trade, I found, for what is generally a libertarian community saying ‘drugs should be openly available to everyone,’ [there is a high] amount of vitriol spewed at the people [selling wildlife].” One user who proposed a sale of tiger cubs as pets was met with remarks such as "this is sick" and “you should be in prison,” according to Wright. “To date, I think the dark web is still very much a niche technology and it’s a technology that is still very western. You need a high level of education and a high level of technical skill, and you need to be in a society that is strictly regulating the kind of trade that you’re interested in taking part in,” said Wright. “There’s been much less need for somebody in Vietnam to use all these complicated […]
