How criminals sell drugs and rare animals in social networks

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Defenders of wildlife claimed that illegal animal dealers are actively posting their offers on Facebook. This is not the first time that criminals use the social network and services belonging to it. In Brazil, they have been struggling with drug trafficking through WhatsApp for several years. He writes about it lenta.ru

Animal advocates

A network of clandestine animal dealers on Facebook was uncovered by staff Traffic. As follows from their report, the criminals act through closed communities registered in Western Malaysia. Animal defenders under the guise of buyers entered 14 of such groups, and in five months counted more than 300 ads for the sale of rare and endangered animals. Gibbons, Malay bears, pandas, turtles and birds were actively bought as pets or for resale. All managed to identify more than 100 vendors.

The trade in rare animals is not typical for Malaysia. Unlike other countries of Southeast Asia, the country has no established market and there is no steady demand for exotic species of mammals and amphibians. Traffic employees believe that illegal communities were created by Malaysians only because the local Facebook administration does not closely monitor violations of the social network’s internal rules. During the five months of observation, none of the groups was blocked, although almost 68 thousands of people were in them.

Only after Traffic presented the results of the investigation to the leaders of the social network in Southeast Asia, access to the groups was immediately limited, and Facebook employees promised to help activists in the search for criminals. All documents were handed over to local authorities, who have already announced the arrest of several dozen illegal traffickers. Nevertheless, zoodefenders fear that the sale of animals through social networks is much more widespread.

Strict rules

The case in Malaysia is more likely to be recognized as an exception for Facebook. Usually, the management of the social network harshly stops any attempts to buy and sell illegal substances and objects. In 2014, marijuana and pharmaceuticals were added to this list. If the Facebook administration sees such a discussion in one of the groups, it immediately blocks the entire community and only then engages in dialogue with its owners. In January, 2016, a similar ban was imposed on firearms, although the owners of legal stores can still advertise products through a social network.

Sometimes Facebook is too strict in compliance with internal rules and blocks completely legal communities. So, at the beginning of February 2016, the administration of the social network blocked medical marijuana advertising pages permitted in 23 US states. Dozens of medical institutions and public organizations were among the victims, and doctors and patients threatened Facebook with a mass boycott.

However, all these prohibitions do not apply to the company owned messenger WhatsApp. Users, on the contrary, are trying with all their might to convince them that their correspondence is completely confidential and that neither the management of the service nor the special services have access to it. At the end of 2014 of the year, WhatsApp even had the “end-to-end” encryption function: the message is encoded at the time of sending and can only be decrypted by the user to whom it is intended.

This approach to data protection even frightened the FBI: Bureau director James Komi in August 2015 called on the company to provide security services with access to the service's encryption keys, but was refused.

Dose by correspondence

Even more whatsapp policies are unhappy in Brazil. The population of the country quickly mastered such services due to the extremely high prices for calls and SMS, and today they enjoys more than 70 million Brazilians. Almost 45 of millions of them prefer WhatsApp.

In this case, the messenger is massively used to sell weapons and drugs. In Brazil, only officially there are more than 1 are a million drug addicts, and many of them consume heavy substances like crack and cocaine. In addition, one of the main transit routes for delivering cocaine to North America runs through the country.

From the end of 90, local authorities began to form special detachments of police special forces to combat drug mafia and often blocked the delivery channels of prohibited substances. As a result, criminals chose to run their business through instant messengers. Despite the fact that in the 2015 year, the Brazilian government spent more than $ 1,2 billion to fight drugs, the number of dependents continues to grow.

With the help of WhatsApp, criminals debugged a clear scheme for buying bulk quantities of drugs and delivering them to the final consumer. Groupings have a whole network of couriers who correspond with customers and deliver doses on cars, bicycles or mopeds all day long. They also leave “bookmarks” with substances, and then send the coordinates to customers.

The police almost can not prevent criminals, because WhatsApp refuses to provide local intelligence services access to the correspondence of users. The police can obtain personal data of the perpetrators only with an appropriate court decision, but often it is the correspondence that serves as the only evidence of the suspect’s guilt and may lead investigators to intercept a large shipment of drugs.

This situation forces the Brazilian authorities to use unconventional methods of pressure on WhatsApp. At the end of December 2015, after another refusal to provide the police with information on one of the criminal cases, the instant messenger was completely blocked in the country for 48 hours. True, the corresponding court decision was canceled a day later, and during that time more than 1,5 a million Brazilians began to use the secure Telegram service.

And 1 March 2016, the police arrested Facebook Vice President in Latin America Diego Dzodan. He was accused of ignoring the court decision on which he was supposed to testify in a drug trafficking case and to provide data from several WhatsApp users. A day later, Zodan was released, but the management of the social network was outraged by the actions of Brazilian law enforcement agencies.

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