Despite efforts of law enforcement, tech companies and other stakeholders, the illegal online trade in wildlife products continues to increase. A particular problem in tackling this online illicit trade is the misdescription of item materials, making the search for internationally CITES regulated materials, such as elephant ivory, challenging. We investigated the issue of misrepresentation of materials in item descriptions by studying the trade in netsuke, carved objects, attached to the cord of the kimono, originally from 17th century Japan, that are often made of elephant ivory. The study, conducted on the online marketplace, eBay, in the United Kingdom, shows that elephant ivory is still sold in spite of eBay’s policy on ivory. While the netsuke trade is small, elephant ivory was most frequently described as cow bone. Our results also indicated that, among the items identified as elephant ivory, only a small fraction were actually detected and removed by eBay. To discourage the sale of ivory items, eBay should increase its efforts to implement its policy banning the trade in ivory. Further, eBay could consider additional restrictions on the range of words that can be used by the vendors in all of the item listing fields.

中文翻译：

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在网上交易中将象牙伪装成其他材料

尽管执法部门、科技公司和其他利益相关者做出了努力，野生动物产品的非法在线贸易仍在继续增加。解决这种在线非法贸易的一个特殊问题是对物品材料的错误描述，这使得寻找国际 CITES 监管的材料（例如象牙）具有挑战性。我们通过研究挂在和服绳子上的雕刻物品 netsuke 的贸易来调查物品描述中的材料歪曲问题，这些雕刻物品最初来自 17 世纪的日本，通常由象牙制成。这项在英国在线市场 eBay 上进行的研究表明，尽管 eBay 有象牙政策，但象牙仍在销售。虽然根付贸易量很小，但象牙最常被描述为牛骨。我们的结果还表明，在确定为象牙的物品中，只有一小部分被 eBay 实际检测到并删除。为阻止象牙制品的销售，eBay 应加大力度实施其禁止象牙贸易的政策。此外，eBay 可以考虑对供应商可以在所有项目列表字段中使用的单词范围进行额外限制。