What is sale of illegal articles?
To a certain extent, the highlighting features of the internet are maximum reach and anonymity.
Criminals and anti-social elements have been exploiting these features to trade banned/ illegal articles. In such cases web resources outside the country’s legal jurisdiction are used. This makes the task of tracking criminals extremely difficult or sometimes impossible.
What are the threats?
Online resources such as websites, bulletin boards, chat rooms, email are widely used for trading of illegal articles including but not limited to:
- Narcotics
- Weapons
- Animal skins
- Party drugs
What are the risks?
Although this can be termed as a victimless crime in terms of financial loss etc, the articles being sold are termed illegal for a reason.
Narcotics or drugs cause physical and mental damage beyond recovery. Animals are poached due to huge demand of body parts like:
- Skin
- Nails
- Teeth
Innocent people have been victims of terrorist attacks using illegal weapons.
Do we still need to quantify the risk in this crime?
