Fewer than 150 Malayan tigers remain in their home range of Peninsular Malaysia. Poaching to supply an illegal trade in their body parts is a major threat to the survival of this critically endangered subspecies of tiger, Panthera tigris jacksoni. A new study details a link between the trafficking of people and Malayan tiger parts: Vietnamese migrant workers in Malaysia, indebted to their employers, often turn to the illegal wildlife trade, while network managers and vessel captains use fishing boats to smuggle tiger parts to Vietnam.

The study, published in January in the journal Trends in Organized Crime, drew on six months of interviews with 53 people familiar with fishing-boat smuggling routes and wildlife trade networks between Malaysia and Vietnam. These individuals included poachers, transporters, brokers, wildlife traders and consumers who purchased the final products. Tiger skins, bones and other body parts are trafficked for traditional medicine and ornaments. Bones are particularly coveted for unproven treatment of ailments like joint pain, epilepsy and sexual performance issues.

“Criminal groups are entrepreneurial and adaptive and can capitalize on emerging opportunities,” Rob Pickles, counter-wildlife crime research and analytics chief with wildcat conservation NGO Panthera Malaysia and lead author of the study, said in a news release. “Understanding how and where these networks converge provides law enforcement agencies with a wider range of options for disrupting wildlife trafficking and recovering the tiger.”

Economic hardship, worker exploitation

Between 1999 and 2018, nearly 6,000 species of flora and fauna were seized in global trade, contributing to biodiversity loss and impacting public health, security and economic development, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported in 2020. However, as Pickles’s study shows, the trade isn’t profitable for everyone involved. Many people roped into wildlife trafficking are exploited through indentured labor and debt bondage, including instances of forced and child labor on vessels involved in illegal fishing and the smuggling of people and wildlife products.

The new study found that economic hardship in rural areas and the fisheries sector, combined with weak regulations on migrant worker employment, have created conditions for the trafficking of both people and wildlife between Malaysia and Vietnam. Poverty is a key driver, with many poachers coming from Quang Binh, a rural, climate-vulnerable province in Vietnam.

“People from Quang Binh are … preferred by trafficking networks because of their forest skills and toughness,” Pickles told Mongabay via email.

Vietnamese migrant workers enter Malaysia legally with work permits arranged by agents in Vietnam, primarily for jobs in construction and sawmills near wildlife-rich areas, the study suggested. While they may not initially intend to poach, financial pressures push some into wildlife crime. Debts from recruitment fees and lower-than-promised wages controlled by Vietnamese agents in Malaysia were commonly cited burdens among the interviewed workers. Some fled employers who withheld their passports, shifting into organized wildlife crime after they became undocumented, according to the paper. Vietnamese migrants who joined trafficking networks saw Malaysia’s wildlife as abundant, enforcement risks as low, and poaching as a relatively easy and financially rewarding income source. 

The Vietnamese trafficking network managers who recruit them, alongside specialist poachers from Vietnam, control the poaching operations, according to the paper. They provide housing and supplies before deploying the poachers into forests to hunt not only Malayan tigers but other species such as monkeys, porcupines, civets and boars. They resupply the poachers during these multimonth expeditions and oversee the collection and sale of wildlife products, the paper notes.

“But the poachers themselves have to pay for all this, the value of the products they bring back from the forest is written off against their in-country expenses they rack up. This can mean it takes two or three poaching expeditions before an individual poacher starts to make profit,” Pickles said.

There’s no single kingpin controlling this trade, Pickles said: “The core of the enterprise is composed of small Malaysia-based interconnected trafficking networks that adaptively cooperate. The organisational structure is non-hierarchical, but made up of different independent groups temporarily and adaptively working together to create a seamless supply chain.” 

Tiger parts and other wildlife products are transported to Vietnam by trusted couriers. After completing several hunting expeditions, poachers typically return to Vietnam by plane or bus, though some use fishing boats. Pickles’s team found that fishing boats from Malaysia and Vietnam rendezvous at sea to smuggle both people and wildlife products. 

Vietnamese fishing crews also often face exploitation. Some work as skilled, paid professionals known as “home soldiers,” while others are indentured laborers known as “service soldiers” who may be tricked into joining, abused and denied wages. Interviewees reported children as young as 10, often orphans or from broken families, working in poor conditions on the fishing boats, the study found.

Some Vietnamese fishing crews opportunistically buy Malaysian wildlife products at ports for private resale back home, Pickles said. However, high-value products like tiger parts are smuggled through established collaborations between fishing boat owners in Vietnam and Malaysia. Vessel captains receive these products from Malaysia-based wildlife traders and network managers, then transport them in a direct courier operation, he added.

The study identifies the coastal cities of Kuantan and Johor Bahru in Malaysia and Tac Cau and Song Doc in Vietnam as key hubs for the illegal movement of wildlife and people between the two countries. 

Mark Darmaraj, country director for the environmental NGO WCS Malaysia, said his group was not involved in the study but was aware of its findings prior to publication through past interactions with Panthera, other NGOs and Malaysian authorities. Although the findings came as no surprise, Darmaraj welcomed the study as “an attempt to piece together the poaching and trade chain.”

He suggested expanding research to Malaysia’s northeast coast, closer to Vietnam, and exploring land smuggling routes through Thailand “to better understand the Vietnamese poaching issue so that we can devise long-term interventions to cripple the chain,” Darmaraj told Mongabay via email.

Noting the study’s finding that Vietnamese poaching in Malaysia declined during COVID-19 but has since resurged, Darmaraj stressed the need for continuous monitoring to track its shifts and warned that limited resources could hamper effective coverage.

Targeted interventions

Malaysia has improved wildlife crime enforcement on land and at sea, establishing key initiatives like the National Tiger Task Force, the multiagency Khazanah Integrated Operation that coordinates enforcement actions, and the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, which has seized thousands of vessels carrying contraband worth more than $150 million since 2019. Meanwhile, Vietnam has strengthened its penal code, deployed fisheries control boats to patrol the maritime border, and implemented the satellite-based vessel monitoring system to track boat activity.

“While we have made tangible gains on the counter-poaching front, there is a risk that failing to address some of the key gaps highlighted will leave Malaysia’s tiny and fragmented tiger population exposed,” Pickles told Mongabay by email. “We know how rapidly small tiger populations can be wiped out, with under 150 individuals left in the wild, the stakes for the Malayan tiger are high.”

First, Vietnamese-run tiger poaching must be viewed as “a strategic threat” in Malaysia as it operates differently from and has a far greater impact than other forms of poaching, Pickles said. “Current efforts address ‘tiger poaching’ in the broad sense,” he said, but a more targeted response is needed, including stronger bilateral coordination with Vietnam to address cross-border trafficking and information gaps that criminals exploit.

Second, he said, loopholes in immigration and fisheries management systems enable tiger traffickers, as the agencies involved neither handle terrestrial wildlife crimes nor prioritize them. These loopholes should be dismantled, he said. 

Third, Pickles said addressing human exploitation and economic vulnerabilities can help prevent recruitment into tiger trafficking, and NGOs and community groups can do so by developing targeted interventions for Vietnamese migrant workers in Malaysia, and poaching communities and fishing workers in Vietnam.

The paper emphasized the need to raise risks for network managers and brokers, who currently face minimal consequences, and to clearly communicate these risks to potential poachers in Vietnam and Malaysia as a deterrent. 

Darmaraj agreed that such preventive interventions are important, but noted they may take time to be effective, so on-the-ground law enforcement remains a priority. He stressed the need to sustain and expand Malaysia’s community ranger program to boost patrolling efforts.

While Vietnamese poachers target Malayan tigers directly with snares, local poachers threaten prey species like sambar deer (Rusa unicolor) and gaur cattle (Bos gaurus), which also harms the tigers, Darmaraj said. Conserving the Malayan tiger requires more than antipoaching efforts, he said: Prey must be augmented through habitat enrichment and potential captive breeding, forest habitats must be maintained and connected, and human-wildlife conflict must be mitigated. 

“Sustained funds and political will to support all these initiatives are needed to be garnered if the Malayan tiger is to survive and thrive over the next decade in Malaysia,” Darmaraj said.

Banner image: Fewer than 150 critically endangered Malayan tigers (Panthera tigris jacksoni) remain in the wild, and poaching for the illegal wildlife trade poses a major threat to their survival. Image courtesy of NuvistaTV/ Panthera.

Citation:

Pickles, R. S., Anh, L. T., Enoch, S., & Clements, G. R. (2025). Webs of exploitation and opportunism: Tiger trafficking and crime convergence between Malaysian and Vietnam. Trends in Organized Crime. doi:10.1007/s12117-024-09549-x