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.

In 2016, the Wildlife Justice Commission and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks Peninsular Malaysia conducted an investigation into the illegal trade in tiger parts in Malaysia. Investigators found an apartment in Kuala Lumpur occupied by eight Vietnamese men and seized a number of tiger skins and bear claws. Later, officials found that the Vietnamese men had been trafficked to Malaysia to collect agarwood in the Malaysian forests, where the group also opportunistically poached tigers and collected wildlife products to earn money. The men’s passports had been withheld from them by their traffickers, to be returned only once they had earned enough money to cover their expenses. Further investigations revealed that the same syndicate responsible for trafficking these men had also recruited Vietnamese women to work in the sex industry in Malaysia, where they were similarly dispossessed of their passports and made to work until they had covered the costs of their transportation and housing.

Mexico has become a major hub for both wildlife and Drug Trafficking, especially for transnational criminal syndicates. This has likely been prompted by a combination of existing Drug Trafficking infrastructure, high levels of biodiversity, and the lack of strict wildlife trafficking penalties in Mexico. For example, the Sinaloa Cartel, primarily a Drug Trafficking group, has been linked to foreign Organised Crime groups. The cartel smuggles totoaba – an endangered fish endemic to Mexico – abroad, with a single swim bladder costing as much as tens of thousands of dollars. Whereas traders in both legal and illegal wildlife commodities previously transacted directly with local poachers and fishermen, Mexican cartels have, increasingly, forcibly inserted themselves as middlemen, extorting both legal and illegal fishermen for fees, sometimes threatening violence for non-compliance, and once dominion over an area has been established, demanding that all catch be sold to them at a price of their choosing. They subsequently sell - at a hefty markup – to foreign traders and traffickers who move the product from Mexico’s borders to other international markets. Some studies have identified a trend in which Mexican cartels illegally trade wildlife, especially higher-value marine species like the totoaba, with other international crime syndicates in exchange for chemical precursors for drug production – particularly for methamphetamine and fentanyl – which are then manufactured in Mexico and often smuggled across the border into the US. This enables cartels to forego the challenge of laundering illicit profits through other more traditional and labour intensive or convoluted means.

Russia contains over a fifth of the world’s forested areas and, prior to 2022, was exporting more than US$3 billion a year worth of timber to the EU. Following the invasion of Ukraine, the EU imposed a ban on Russian timber (among other goods) but these products continue to arrive in the EU and UK. Some techniques used to evade timber sanctions include routing timber through third countries such as China, Turkey, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, or mislabelling timber as originating from these regions. Following the sanctions placed on Russian timber, EU imports from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan increased from €445,000 to over €30 million. However, both countries have relatively little tree cover, indicating the possibility of fraudulent rerouting. FIs involved in the timber industry should be aware of these illicit practices to help minimise the risk of unwittingly assisting in sanctions contravention.

Under Romania’s 2021 law aimed at protecting forests, every truckload of wood or timber products must be photographed and uploaded to an electronic tracking system (SUMAL) to ensure that they are being logged with permission, so that inspectors can confirm that loggers are only harvesting wood from authorised species. However, SUMAL cannot detect fake images, and reporters have recently uncovered that some drivers, instead of submitting legitimate photos of their wood or timber, are instead uploading fake or unrelated images (including drinking parties), reusing the same photo multiple times, or taking photos of photos. This raises significant questions on the integrity and reliability of the monitoring system, increasing the risks for companies of buying illegally logged wood, with repercussions on financial institutions financing timber purchases or facilitating related transactions.

Bhagavan “Doc” Antle – featured in the Netflix series Tiger King – pleaded guilty to animal trafficking and Money Laundering in 2023 for overseeing the sale and purchase of cheetah cubs, lion cubs, tigers, and chimpanzees, all of which are protected as endangered species under both CITES and US law. He utilised bulk cash payments to hide illegal transactions, falsified paperwork, and requested that payments for endangered species be made to his nonprofit to hide the transactions as ‘donations’. Furthermore, investigators found evidence that Antle was also using cash acquired by illegally transporting and harbouring immigrants, further demonstrating the frequent convergence between different crime typologies in many criminals’ repertoires.

In 2017, the Shuidong Group was convicted for smuggling ivory and pangolin scales from Southern Africa to China. Following an in-depth investigation from the Environmental Investigation Agency, researchers found that the Shuidong Group utilised a network of informal money changers, front companies, complicit freight agents, and circuitous shipping routes to cover up their activities. Payments were made to local poachers in cash in US dollars by local money changers, who were paid in Chinese renminbi by bank transfer. Although Tanzanian officials had carried out a financial investigation into the group for illegal possession of ivory in 2013, it did not appear to lead to any Money Laundering charges, despite revealing the group’s use of front companies and large cash deposits without being flagged by the banks concerned. The Shuidong Group also deliberately chose commercially inefficient shipping routes to obscure the origin of their contraband from Chinese shipping officials, for example by shipping ivory (concealed alongside plastic pellets) from Mozambique through Kenya, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong SAR and finally to China, approximately five months later. The original bill of lading issued in Mozambique covered the journey to South Korea, where traffickers repacked the shipment and used a new set of shipping documents for the onward shipment. Consequently, upon arrival in China, the shipment would appear as though it came from the low-risk jurisdiction of South Korea.

In an analysis of wildlife ranger fatalities in Sri Lanka between 1949 and 2020, researchers recorded 80 deaths – at least one a year. They found that most casualties occurred in protected areas, with homicides accounting for 64% of total deaths. Excluding a terrorist massacre in 1985 that led to 24 casualties, the most significant current risk to rangers aside from encounters with wildlife – namely elephants – are poachers. Notably, attacks by wildlife criminals engaged in illegal wildlife trade have been slowly but steadily increasing since 2010.

Cycads – the world’s oldest seed plants, sometimes referred to as ‘living fossils’ – are one of the most endangered plant groups on earth. The ever-growing demand is often driven by wealthy plant collectors interested in planting rare cycads in their gardens – some of whom may misconceive their actions as ‘protecting’ these plants rather than contributing to their endangerment. While there is a legal market for cultivated cycad varieties, rare cycads – particularly those that are scarce in the wild and thus under threat – remain a desirable, expensive status symbol. Some specimens have sold for millions of pounds each. Notably, every single cycad confiscated by police in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa was on the IUCN Red List, indicating a clear demand for endangered species. For a cycad of around a metre high, a collector could pay up to US$100,000. However, the risks associated with the illegal trade in plants tend to be comparatively low, with less media attention and protection from armed rangers, attracting dedicated ‘cycad syndicates’ to the illicit trade. The profit margins made by such criminals are lucrative, they may pay a local villager less than US$6 to extract a plant from the wild, subsequently selling it for thousands of dollars.

Succulents are a significant emergent illegal wildlife trade market – an issue that has been covered by the Financial Times. Since 2019, more than one million illegally harvested succulents representing 650 different species have been seized during their transit through southern Africa. Despite trade in succulents being increasingly regulated, trafficking continues to be driven by growing demand for them as ornamental plants, particularly in Asia. This has threatened biodiversity in regions such as the Succulent Karoo biome, an area covering zones in South Africa and Namibia where more than 6,000 succulent species are found, with 40% unique to the region. In recognition of the critical biological importance of this region, the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (supported by national and international government bodies) has developed an investment strategy for the Succulent Karoo biome, aiming to ensure sustainable use of the area.

According to the Igarapé Institute, an environmental think tank, Drug Trafficking finances the illegal wildlife trade in the Amazon. Wildlife trafficking requires significant financial resources to bribe public officials and law enforcement agents: for example, police officers are paid to ignore suspicious cargo, veterinarians are paid to issue false reports about the animals in questions, and airport employees are paid to bypass luggage scanners. In some cases, organised criminal groups use the proceeds from Drug Trafficking to enable the trafficking of ornamental fish from Brazil to Colombia.

Jaguars have been listed in the CITES Appendix I since 1975, leading to a significant decline in the trade in jaguar pelts in European and American markets. However, in recent years, jaguar poaching for their body parts (fangs, skulls, bones, skins, paws, meat) is on the rise, with demand primarily driven by Chinese and potentially Southeast Asian markets. For example, a single raid in Brazil in 2016 found body parts of 19 jaguars in a fridge. Furthermore, in 2019, a group of jaguar poachers were prosecuted in Brazil for killing over 1,000 jaguars over the last 30 years.

In Peru, timber bosses have targeted and exploited Indigenous communities in Peru to obtain permits to extract and trade endangered timber such as cedar. In 2013, an alleged timber baron, Teodulfo Palomino Ludena, approached a community near the border of Brazil, promising work and economic support in return for allowing the company, Lanc Forest SAC, to log in the community’s territory. In 2019, however, several inconsistencies came to light, including the alleged harvesting of excess volumes of timber, and using the community’s management plan to launder timber that had been extracted illegally elsewhere. Furthermore, the community’s ledgers had been doctored, with Palomino allegedly forging the signatures of its leaders on deeds.

According to a 2024 report by Transparency International Brazil, titled ‘The Wildlife Laundromat’, criminal organisations utilise elaborate smuggling techniques, including fraud and corruption, to traffic millions of live animals. For example, in 2017, authorities at Miami airport found 21 splash-backed poison frogs – endemic to the southern tributaries of the Amazon river – covered by false paperwork that was issued in Europe and not Brazil, the frogs’ country of origin. This exemplifies the widespread practice of document fraud, which is used to ‘launder’ illegally trafficked wildlife into legal markets. As a wildlife trafficking analyst summarised: “This is not just about smuggling wildlife in suitcases anymore. It’s about laundering money and laundering the animals themselves to pretend their business is legitimate.”

Many Australian animals and plants are unique to the country, and certain animals – particularly lizards and other reptiles – can only be found in remote areas, making them a desirable, lucrative product to sellers and organised criminals. Australian intelligence suggests that international black-market prices for Australian reptiles can be more than 28 times the domestic price, with these high profits and the low penalties for wildlife smuggling attracting many criminals to the illegal wildlife trade. In 2024, Australian police dismantled a smuggling ring involved in exporting native lizards and reptiles, arresting four individuals for attempting to export more than 1.2 million AUD worth of native lizards and reptiles to Hong Kong. The operation was discovered in September 2023, when nine packages containing 59 live lizards were stopped en route to Hong Kong, with police finding a total of 257 lizards and three snakes during the investigation, both in packages and at addresses used by the group.

Zimbabwe's gold-based Money Laundering network operates through a sophisticated cross-border scheme connecting Harare to Dubai, with billions in illicit funds processed monthly. The operation, revealed by a 2023 Al Jazeera investigation, involves competing smuggling rings run by figures like Ewan Macmillan and Kamlesh Pattni, who transport hundreds of kgs of gold weekly from Zimbabwe to Dubai. The laundering mechanism functions with remarkable precision: criminals with unaccounted cash provide these funds to the Zimbabwean government (directly or through smugglers), in exchange, legitimate proceeds from gold sales in Dubai are transferred to the criminals' shell company accounts. This system exploits Zimbabwe's sanctions-constrained economy and its desperate need for US dollars. Both smuggling operations maintain official licenses from Zimbabwe's central bank authorising them to sell the country's gold abroad, creating a veneer of legitimacy. However, instead of returning the proceeds from those sales back to the central bank, the operations instead created shell companies in Dubai as fronts for the gold trade, falsifying invoices, and bribing officials. Pattni, previously implicated in Kenya's 1990s gold scandal that nearly bankrupted the nation, has recreated a similar operation in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Macmillan partners with Alistair Mathias, who specialises in advising clients on Money Laundering techniques. Simon Rudland, one of Zimbabwe's wealthiest individuals and owner of Gold Leaf Tobacco, operates a parallel Money Laundering system through Zimbabwean and South African companies. The case demonstrates how gold's inherent value and portability make it an ideal vehicle for laundering criminal proceeds while simultaneously helping a sanctioned government access international financial markets.

In Zimbabwe, a sophisticated gold smuggling operation led by Uebert Angel, the country's ambassador-at-large to Europe and the Americas, demonstrates how diplomatic cover facilitates international Money Laundering. Angel, a prominent pastor personally appointed by President Emmerson Mnangagwa, worked with his deputy, Rikki Doolan, to offer Money Laundering services to criminals seeking to clean dirty cash. Their operation involved smuggling illicit funds into Zimbabwe, where the money would be used to purchase gold with assistance from Henrietta Rushwaya, the president of Zimbabwe's mining association and a niece of President Mnangagwa. The operation exploited Zimbabwe's desperate need for US dollars amid hyperinflation and international sanctions. Angel's diplomatic status provided perfect cover for moving cash across borders without scrutiny, while his high-level government connections ensured protection for the operation. During Al Jazeera's undercover investigation in 2023, Angel and Doolan explicitly described their Money Laundering system as "a good washing machine" and repeatedly claimed the president was aware of and supported their activities. The scheme offered multiple laundering methods, including using dirty money to purchase gold that would be sold legitimately in Dubai, as well as investing in development projects like a proposed hotel near Victoria Falls – both approaches providing criminals with clean, legitimate funds in return. This case illustrates how corruption at the highest levels of government can transform diplomatic channels into conduits for financial crime, with government officials directly profiting from undermining their own country's financial regulations.

In rural Gwanda, Zimbabwe, illegal small-scale gold mining has devastated local farming communities already struggling with climate change-induced droughts. An estimated 400,000 illegal miners operate throughout Zimbabwe without permits, working primarily at night to evade police detection while systematically destroying farmland. The environmental impacts include deforestation, water pollution, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, creating a complex web of challenges for subsistence farmers. Specific community impacts are severe: farmers report waking to find their farmland completely dug up by miners, livestock deaths from falling into abandoned mine pits, and critical road infrastructure so damaged that transportation costs have tripled from R100 to R300 (US$5.43 to US$16.40). Women have been disproportionately affected, losing vital alternative income sources like harvesting mopane worms (with yields previously exceeding 30 buckets per season) due to deforestation by miners. Excluded from mining operations, these women are forced into peripheral roles such as washing miners' clothes, selling food, or sex work.

The residents of Penhalonga, Zimbabwe face systematic poisoning from illegal and poorly regulated gold mining operations that have contaminated their water supply with toxic levels of mercury and cyanide. Tests conducted by the Standards Association of Zimbabwe in 2023 revealed mercury levels in Lake Alexander – which supplies water to 15,000 Penhalonga residents and 224,000 people in nearby Mutare – far exceeding the safety threshold of 0.02 milligrams per litre. The contamination stems from approximately 1,000 mining pits where artisanal miners use mercury to separate gold from ore and deposit toxic waste into nearby river streams. Additionally, six cyanidation plants in the area release cyanide into water sources during gold processing. Environmental expert Tapuwa O'bren Nhachi notes that "the community is going to carry the burden of diseases due to lack of a clean environment whilst a few politically connected individuals profiteer." Although Zimbabwe's 2002 mining regulations require an Environmental Impact Assessment before mining activities can begin, activists believe this process is often corrupted through bribes to locals to influence the outcome, allowing dangerous operations to continue at the expense of community health and safety

According to an analysis of Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) conducted by the Eastern and Southern African Anti-Money Laundering Group in 2022, the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) of Zambia uncovered a sophisticated scheme involving illegal mining and the trade of precious metals. The case revealed how politically influential persons holding positions within public institutions and a political party orchestrated an illegal mining operation by recruiting and manipulating members of local communities. These individuals systematically exploited their influence to establish an illicit supply chain, first managing the extraction of precious metals through local community members, then handling the transportation and ultimately selling the illegally obtained materials to both Zambian citizens and foreign nationals. Financial analysis revealed that this operation generated over US$8 million in illicit proceeds. The investigation documented how these funds were systematically laundered through the acquisition of tangible assets (including land, buildings, houses, and motor vehicles), investments in fixed-term deposit accounts, establishment of alcohol store businesses, and transfers conducted through mobile money service providers to obscure the money trail. This case highlights the intersection of political influence, resource exploitation, and sophisticated Money Laundering techniques in the mining sector.

According to reports published in by Daily Nation in 2021, ullegal gold mining operations in Lower Zambezi National Park have created a dual crisis of environmental destruction and human exploitation. According to Conservation Lower Zambezi (CLZ) officials, these unauthorised mining activities are driving both deforestation and wildlife killing, as miners cut down trees to access minerals and hunt animals for sustenance. This environmental degradation threatens the park's ecosystem, which was established specifically for tourism and wildlife conservation. The miners themselves appear to be operating under desperate conditions – forced to hunt protected species for food while working in unregulated, likely hazardous mining conditions with no environmental or safety oversight. CLZ officials have emphasised the need for government intervention, having engaged both the previous administration and planning to address the issue with the new government. The case illustrates how illegal resource extraction in protected areas often involves exploitation of both vulnerable environments and vulnerable people, creating a complex challenge that requires addressing both conservation and human welfare concerns simultaneously.