Environmental Deception in Cyber-Enabled Wildlife Trafficking: A Comparative Legal Analysis

Abstract

Wildlife trafficking has also ‘gone digital’ and today, online markets, social media platforms, encrypted communications and electronic payments are used to trade wildlife and wildlife products across borders, often without the buyer's knowledge. Although cyber wildlife trafficking has been a focus of existing scholarship, and the use of digital technologies in wildlife trafficking has been discussed, fewer researchers have focused on the legal and regulatory difficulties created by environmental deception in cyber wildlife trafficking networks.

The article reviews the phenomenon of ‘environmental deception' in wildlife trafficking in the context of Wildlife Trafficking and compares the legal frameworks in India, the United States and the United Kingdom. By using a doctrinal and comparative legal approach, the study examines the ability of current wildlife protection and cybercrime laws to create tools to tackle digitally mediated wildlife trafficking. It discusses the typology of environmental deception in relation to species misrepresentation, origin laundering, documentation fraud, digital concealment and legitimacy laundering, and how these deceptions leverage regulatory fragmentation between jurisdictions.

The analysis reveals that the three jurisdictions have laws that criminalise wildlife trafficking, but the current laws are largely focused on the traditional trafficking model and are poorly designed for the digital wildlife market environment. These differences in regulatory effectiveness are more due to the differences in the institutional coordination, digital investigative capacity and enforcement mechanisms, than to the legislative prohibition itself. The article contends that it is a big problem for today's environmental governance and that the environmental protection law needs to be more integrated with the regulation of cybercrime and transnational cooperation for its enforcement in this area.