In the rural Rwandan village of Bugeshi near the Democratic Republic of the Congo border, the illegal wildlife trade flourishes through informal border crossings despite official checkpoints just miles away. According to an investigation by The Bridge Magazine, local moto-taxi drivers transport wildlife contraband including ivory and rhino horns using creative concealment methods – hiding products inside shipments of used clothing or food items that receive minimal inspection. Political tensions between Rwanda and Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2022 have created opportunities for smugglers, who exploit gaps in cross-border collaboration and enforcement. The rugged terrain along this border region – characterised by marshlands and biodiversity-rich landscapes – provides natural cover for illegal crossings. While the Rwanda Investigation Bureau reported investigating 24 wildlife crime cases involving 52 suspects in 2022/23, local sources indicate the actual volume of trafficking remains substantial. The borderland's reputation as a high-risk zone where armed groups operate creates both challenges for law enforcement and opportunities for smugglers who blend into the regular flow of informal cross-border trade to move their illicit goods undetected.

In 2023, the US banned three Congolese public officials and their wives from entering the country, claiming that the three had falsified permits to traffic protected species in exchange for bribes. According to a public statement, the officials abused their public positions by trafficking chimpanzees, gorillas, okapi, and other protected wildlife to destinations including China. The officials included current and former heads of the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo Management Authority for CITES. Furthermore, one of the officers was previously suspended from the ICCN in 2021 for allegedly being involved in mismanagement and serious breaches of statutory duties, demonstrating a history of misbehaviour and the prevalence of corruption in relation to illegal wildlife trade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a systemic failure enables the recycling and laundering of seized wildlife contraband back into illegal markets. Despite regular seizures of ivory by authorities, the Democratic Republic of the Congo lacks a centralised management system for these confiscated items. Instead, ivory is dispersed across multiple government entities, including the Central Bank of Congo, ICCN patrol posts, customs offices, courts, police stations, and local environmental services. This decentralisation creates perfect conditions for corruption and theft. In December 2022, authorities in Uvira, South Kivu province, seized nearly half a ton of ivory (representing approximately 20 slaughtered elephants), but environmental defenders report that the ultimate destination of this ivory remains unknown, making it likely the contraband will re-enter the black market. Some seized ivory bears markings suggesting it was previously in government custody, confirming the circular nature of this problem. Some wildlife defenders are urging the government to strengthen security systems and begin destroying seized ivory through burning to prevent its return to illegal trade channels – although such actions have also been criticised as being ineffective or potentially problematic, for example, by creating scarcity in supply and circulation which may drive up demand, or by failing to address the root causes of poaching.

Since late 2022, the southern portion of Virunga National Park has fallen under the control of M23 rebels and Nyantura police forces, effectively halting gorilla monitoring activities and increasing poaching threats. According to Oxpeckers, throughout other sections of the park, various militia groups including Mai Mai, FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), and ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) attack wildlife and facilitate cross-border trafficking. According to Kivu Security Tracker, the illegal cross-border trade of natural resources generates an estimated $175 million annually, with armed groups receiving approximately $50 million between 2017 and 2020. This creates a dangerous connection between wildlife crime and regional insecurity. Conservation efforts are further hampered by understaffed and poorly equipped eco-guards, frequent attacks on ranger stations, and the release of detained poachers and traffickers. The situation has become so dire in some areas that monitoring of endangered mountain gorilla groups has completely stopped, leaving young gorillas particularly vulnerable to capture by poachers.

The bushmeat trade in central Democratic Republic of the Congo operates through a complex network connecting remote forests to urban markets. According to a Mongabay investigation, porters make long journeys from forests near Salonga National Park to transport smoked bushmeat to local markets, where vendors sell meat from various protected species including primates. A porter might pay a hunter about $4.70 USD for a small monkey carcass and later net $25 USD for delivering a 25-35 kg load to markets. This trade in the meat and body parts of protected species has evolved from subsistence hunting to commercial exploitation, with hunters establishing forest camps to process large quantities of meat bound for Kinshasa's wealthy markets and international buyers. Wildlife populations near accessible areas have been depleted, forcing hunters deeper into protected areas. While local protein needs drive some demand, the volume of bushmeat in Lodja exceeds local requirements, with much being funnelled toward Kinshasa's 17 million inhabitants, where growing wealth has increased demand for wild meat as a luxury item.

In the remote town of Lodja in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mongabay has documented how the illegal wildlife trade has created a devastating economic incentive system that threatens endangered bonobos – which are in high demand as exotic pets. Local hunters can earn approximately $200 USD for capturing a live baby bonobo, while middlemen in towns like Lodja can make $450 USD per animal – substantial sums in a country where two-thirds of the population lives on less than $2.15 USD per day. The capture of a single infant bonobo typically results in the deaths of additional apes, as mothers and family members defend their young to the death. Indeed, a 2013 report on the illegal ape trade concluded that five to 10 animals die for every one taken from the wild. This trade is driven by wealthy international buyers, primarily in China, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates, where a single bonobo might ultimately sell for $300,000 USD.

In 2023, Colombian authorities shut down 40-50 warehouses near Bogota Airport, arresting 15 people and confiscating illegal wildlife worth about $12 million USD. According to a Guardian article on the case, the warehouses were used by a Chinese-run operation which was sending cryptocurrency to Colombia in exchange for animals from the Amazon rainforest.

In 2016, Colombian police busted the country’s largest wildlife trafficking organisation at the time, which made an estimated $80-140 million USD each month. According to police, the gang used codewords for different species, and paid farmers to go into animals’ natural habitats to capture them. 90% of the species trafficked by the group were endangered, including parrots, parakeets, turtles, macaws, flamingos, toucans, capybaras, and others. The animals were typically drugged and transported to collection centres in the homes of small traders. For some bird species such as toucans and macaws, buyers were paying between $4-600,000 USD. When the authorities discovered the organisation’s operations, they found that birds were stuffed into soda bottles or sedated and attached to traffickers’ bodies.

In September 2023, Colombian police seized over 200 young caimans – small relatives of alligators that are endemic to the wetlands and rivers of South America – from a small town called Sucre. They found the reptiles crowded in a damp pit at the back of the property, poached from local rivers. Young caimans are in particular demand for the high fashion market as their leather is more supple and thus more valuable. Despite growing efforts from authorities, however, it has been difficult to convict traffickers – police reported that they had caught the suspect in this case four times already, and there are suspected ties to the Gulf Clan, Colombia’s largest drug cartel, which may be involved in and be receiving a cut from reptile trafficking.

In April 2025, Nigerian officials arrested a Chinese national suspected of masterminding a transnational smuggling operation of pangolin scales. The arrest was linked to the seizure of more than 7 metric tons of pangolin scales in Nigeria in August 2024, following more than five months of on-the-ground surveillance. The seizure was estimated to be worth over $1.4 million USD, and authorities expected the arrest of the suspect to have lasting disruptive effects on the Nigeria-based criminal syndicates supplying the illegal wildlife trade.

Madagascar is home to some of the world’s most valuable rosewood. However, in the last decade, enormous demand from China has led individuals from all over the region to fell rosewood from the forests. While the rosewood trade has been banned in Madagascar for two decades, the government has issued brief exemption periods – muddying the legal waters by allowing traffickers to claim their wood was harvested during an exemption period and therefore legal. Furthermore, traffickers continue to smuggle rosewood out of the country by bribing government officials, before shipping rosewood through circuitous routes towards China, bribing inspectors to avoid inspections and mis-labelling the containers as vanilla or other products. The rosewood can then legally enter China with the ‘correct’ documents, typically acquired through bribery, despite being illegally felled.

There have been several reports of environmental defenders protesting the illegal rosewood trade in Madagascar being intimidated and imprisoned. In 2017, Clovis Razafimalala, who heads an environmental advocacy group based near Masoala National Park in northeast Madagascar, was arrested and held for 10 months while awaiting trial. He has a record of lobbying the government to prosecute timber barons and to reopen a local customs office to make it harder for criminals to smuggle rosewood out of the country. He was eventually convicted of destruction of public property and arson, fined $1,800 USD, and sentenced to five years of prison. However, like many other environmental defenders, he was immediately released on parole. In correspondence with Mongabay, Razafimalala explained that releasing him with a conviction and an unserved prison sentence that can be called in at any moment was an effort to “shut him up”. Two years prior, Armand Marozafy, another member of the same group, was convicted of defamation and served five months in jail for identifying two alleged rosewood traffickers in a private email.

Orchids are hugely diverse and make up more than 70% of all CITES-listed species. However, large volumes of illegal trade in endangered orchid species continue. According to a 2019 study on the orchid trade in China, researchers found trade in more than 400 species of orchids collected from the wild, involving more than 1.2 million individual orchids, potentially worth more than $14.6 million USD – in just one year. The researchers found that wild orchids were often mixed with nursery-bred orchids, with traders paying cheap labourers in countries like Laos and Myanmar to harvest wild orchids. In fact, the researchers found that some 100 species of orchids being sold in the southern China markets were not native. There were also no declared imports in the CITES trade database for the majority of the species, rendering the trade in breach of CITES regulations.

According to ENACT Africa, criminal syndicates and buyers from major cities in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Nigeria buy pangolins from poaching cells made up of locals based in pangolins’ natural habitats. In particular, Cameroon has emerged as a major transit country for pangolins trafficked from the Central African Republic, with traffickers bribing border and customs officials to secure ease of passage for illegal wildlife products and to provide false customs declarations for their shipments. Major markets for pangolin products include China, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, though there is also a route from Cameroon north through Chad and Sudan through which endangered animals such as pangolins are trafficked to markets in Arab countries.

In May 2024, the US levied sanctions on two companies (Mining Industries SARLU and Logistique Economique Etrangere SARLU) linked to the Wagner Group (now known as the Africa Corps), a private Russian military company that is backed by the Kremlin and active in many African countries. According to the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Wagner Group has established a vast security and business network in the Central African Republic, which includes involvement in illegal logging and timber trafficking.

In 2021, a joint operation between the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo governments led to the arrest of two foreign nationals for wildlife trafficking in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The authorities seized 938 kg of ivory and 34 kg of pangolin scales, worth around $3.5 million USD. The indictment alleged that the defendants paid bribes to authorities in Kinshasa to allow them to ship the commodities, and that they intended to conceal larger shipments in timber or corn to avoid detection.

According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, armed groups have been active in Cameroon’s national parks and forest areas for the past two decades, and these groups have poached rare animal species to finance their activities. The Bouba Ndjida National Park, which is located close to Cameroon’s borders with Chad and the Central African Republic, is home to many important biodiverse species, and has also experienced high levels of poaching. The elephant population, for example, has significantly diminished following acts of poaching orchestrated by cross-border criminal groups. In 2020, a new armed separatist group called the MLC was established in the tri-border area between Cameroon, Chad, and the Central African Republic, and members of the group have been involved in clashes with the military near the national park. One of the MLC members who was arrested confessed that the illicit trade in animal products sourced from Bouba Njida is a temporary means of financing while they try to establish other income sources.

Due to the reduction of rosewood stocks in Nigeria, traffickers seeking to satisfy demand from China have been harvesting Cameroonian rosewood by bribing forest guards and Nigerian authorities. According to the Pulitzer Centre, Nigerian woodcutters fell trees in Cameroon, before smuggling the timber to Nigeria, where authorities are bribed to certify the logs as legally harvested in Nigeria. This then facilitates the export of containers of rosewood to China.

In 2021, two wildlife traffickers in Cameroon were arrested and prosecuted for the illegal possession and trafficking of nine protected species, including three African grey parrots and six pink-ringed parakeets. They were sentenced to five months in prison, reflecting the Cameroon government’s increasing crackdown on the wildlife trade. In Cameroon, wildlife trafficking in protected species can be punished with imprisonment up to three years and/or a fine of up to 10 million CFA francs, or approximately $16,000 USD.

Following a multi-year investigation, the Environmental Investigation Agency found that over 500,000 tons of timber – including large quantities of rosewood – have been exported from Mozambique to China every year since 2017, in direct violation of CITES and Mozambique’s log export ban. According to a Mozambique government report summarised by the BBC, al-Shabab insurgents in Mozambique have utilised the illegal timber trade to “fuel and finance the reproduction of violence”. In particular, the illicit trade in rosewood has been linked to the financing of Islamic-State linked militants in the northernmost province of Cabo Delgado, with an estimated revenue of $1.9 million USD per month. While data on the specific nature of insurgents’ involvement in the timber trade is scarce, there have been reports of firms paying a 10% protection fee to the jihadist groups to carry out illegal logging in forest areas. According to trading sources, an estimated 30% of the timber logged in Cabo Delgado is at high risk of coming from insurgency-occupied forests. Rosewood is then typically shipped to China, where huge volumes are imported.

In January 2025, the CITES secretariat recommended that all trade in Cambodian long-tailed macaques be suspended until Cambodian authorities outline measures implemented to prevent the laundering of wild monkeys through breeding facilities, noting that the volume of births reported in five of the country’s six registered monkey-breeding facilities are “disproportionately high relative to what is considered biologically possible.” The rate was listed as three offspring every two years per female, while a typical birth rate for the species would see females give birth to a single infant every year or two. As such, the animal committee wrote that the birth rate among Cambodia’s breeding facilities suggests “that some regular supply of wild specimens was necessary (at least in the past) to maintain a high reproductive output at least in some facilities”.

Circuitous shipping routes continue to be widely used in illegal wildlife trade. For example, the Environmental Investigation Agency found that 300 containers of rosewood were shipped between Mozambique and China between October 2023 and March 2024, stopping en route via ports in Comoros, India, and the United Arab Emirates before reaching Shanghai. This trade occurred in spite of a long-standing ban on rosewood exports from Mozambique. In recognition of the significant volume (72-90%) of illegal wildlife trade being carried out via the shipping industry, the World Shipping Council announced in 2024 an initiative explicitly aimed at fighting wildlife smuggling by sea, providing sector-specific guidance to shipping companies.

Logging of Siamese rosewood – one of the world’s most valuable tree species – has been banned in Cambodia since 2013. However, ongoing demand from Vietnam and China has continued to devastate rosewood stocks. In 2017, Cambodia complained to the UN about rosewood smuggling from Cambodia to Vietnam, alleging that Vietnam had continued to allow the entry of rosewood into the country, despite knowing that the CITES permits that accompany the shipments are illegal and fraudulent. The rare wood is then laundered through a quota system in Vietnam, which ultimately gives it lawful status and allows it to be sold on to further markets. A previous report from the Environmental Investigation Agency also revealed the complicity of Vietnamese officials, companies, and private individuals in smuggling illegally logged timber from protected areas of Cambodia into Vietnam.

Timber is a key trafficked commodity in Bulgaria – between a third to a quarter of all felled trees in the country are sold on the black market, with concerning links to Fraud & Corruption. In 2020, a Bulgarian independent media outlet – the Bureau for Investigative Reporting and Data – identified over 200 private companies that overexploited their permitted felling quotas, of which 20 to 30 were felling many times more wood than their permits allowed. According to the investigation, some had identifiable links to political parties and, as a result, were allowed to harvest more wood than others. In one incident, a forest inspector allegedly asked a company on site to provide proof of the wood quantities being hauled, but representatives of the company refused to do so. They were reportedly under the escort of a member of Parliament’s car. Furthermore, appointments of forest regulators are also allegedly handed out by well-connected and influential businesspeople involved in the logging business. Officials responsible for controlling logging operations may face losing their jobs if a particular company’s interests are threatened.

The sturgeon fish – from which caviar is farmed – has been protected since 1998 under CITES, and since 2000, a strict international labelling system has been in place for all caviar products to prevent the illegal trade. However, a 2023 study found that 21% of caviar and sturgeon samples analysed came from wild-caught sturgeons, and that 29% of the samples violated CITES regulations and trade laws – which included caviar that listed the wrong species of sturgeon or the wrong country of origin. Furthermore, another 32% of samples were declared as wild products, despite actually originating from aquaculture.