Trade of rare animals and their body parts is going on through popular websites including Quikr, Olx, eBay, Amazon and Youtube, the government today said.
Union Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave said online smuggling of rare animals and their parts are being monitored by the state and central governments as part of combating cyber crime.
"Several websites are seen advertising sale of rare animals and their parts," Dave said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha even as he furnished a list of 106 such websites collated by the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB).
The 106 websites include prominent names like quikr.Com, olx.In, alibaba.Com, eBay.Com, youtube.Com, amazon.Com, shopping.Rediff.Com, petsmart.Com and snapdeal.Com.
EBay said that it has zero tolerance for wrongdoing and has strict policies to stop sale of products from endangered animals on its website, Quikr maintained if they come across fraudulent listing, they delete it and also block the user.
Dave said several steps have been taken to prevent such illegal activities which include utilising services of cyber crime specialists on contractual basis to carry out regular cyber patrolling to detect posts and offers on such portals.
He said if any such offer is detected, details are retrieved of the suspect and information is passed on to relevant enforcement agencies for legal action.
A meeting of representatives from online trade portals was convened in May this year to discuss issues pertaining to online wildlife trade, sensitise them about it and discuss modalities to assist WCCB in case of such detections.
Dave said during training and sensitisation programmes conducted by WCCB, the issue of illegal online wildlife trade is being highlighted so that officials involved in the enforcement are abreast of such trends.
"eBay has zero tolerance for wrongdoing and has strict policies in place to stop the sale of products from endangered animals on the site. All these policies and guidelines, including what is restricted and not allowed is published and updated on our site," eBay said in a statement.
Atul Tewari, COO of Quikr in his response said that the company uses a combination of human effort, technology and phone verification to moderate our listings and has a team of 100+ people who work 24x7 to manually review them .
A wildlife body had recently alleged that a prominent
website was selling wildlife specimens, including sea horses and alligator heads, protected under the country's laws.
Wildlife SOS had claimed the website was offering an array of wildlife trophies, including alligator heads, preserved snakes, butterflies, starfish, rare beetles and seahorses, besides hunting manuals and devices.
EBay said that that if any listing violation is found on the site, not only do they remove the listing, but the seller may also be subjected to a range of other actions, including restrictions of their buying and selling privileges and suspension of their account.
Meanwhile Tewari, COO of Quikr said that the company's tech team has spent thousands of hours creating cutting-edge tools that filter wrong or duplicate listings and those with unwanted words and those that violate our comprehensive listing policy.
He added that at various times, the team has also reached out to customers for verification over the phone to crosscheck the authenticity of the listing.
"If we do come upon a fraudulent listing, we delete it and also block the user from accessing the site," he said.
