The illegal wildlife trade generates proceeds estimated at up to USD 23 billion a year, and the FATF's 2020 report found traffickers routinely using front companies and trade-based techniques to launder them through the legitimate economy.
The rating above is indicative — it reflects inherent risk as assessed in the published frameworks, not a verdict on any business. Entire industries serve these sectors as business as usual; the rating your firm actually applies comes from its own business-wide risk assessment, where the sector factor combines with your customer base, controls and risk appetite.
The FATF's Money Laundering and the Illegal Wildlife Trade report (2020) — its first global study of the sector — found that traffickers exploit both financial and non-financial sectors to move and hide proceeds, typically through front companies in import/export, logistics, breeding and pet-trade businesses, and through mis-priced or mis-described trade shipments.
The legal-trade perimeter is set by CITES permits and, in the EU, the Wildlife Trade Regulations; environmental crime is a predicate offence for money laundering in the EU, so proceeds connected to trafficking taint everything they touch downstream.
Firms exposed to the trade in animals, plants or derived products must verify CITES and trade documentation, weigh geographic risk on both ends of a shipment, apply CDD to the real parties behind trading companies, and report suspicion. Sector risk combines with geography, the customer’s profile and the product to set the overall rating — and every client still needs sanctions, PEP and adverse-media screening on the parties themselves.
