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A man in Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty Monday to attempting to export around 850 turtles, worth about $1.4 million, by wrapping them in socks or diapers and labeling them “plastic animal toys,” authorities said.
The man, Wei Qiang Lin, of China, began exporting the turtles to Hong Kong in August 2023, and over the next 15 months tried to export 222 packages containing the live creatures, according to the Department of Justice. He also tried to ship other animals, including lizards and venomous snakes, authorities said.
Lin’s turtle trade was exposed in the fall of 2023 after an undercover agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service coordinated the sale of turtles with him through Facebook and Lin shipped them, according to a criminal complaint.
He faces up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000 on a charge related to illegal animal trafficking. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 23.
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A lawyer for Lin did not immediately return a request for comment.
A photo of an Eastern box turtle. Millions of turtles are traded all over the world each year, with some being eaten or used in traditional medicine, according to Jordan Gray, a spokesperson for Turtle Survival Alliance.Melissa Winters, NHFG Nongame Certified Wildlife Biologist
According to prosecutors, after authorities discovered Lin’s trade, they tailed him for months, intercepting packages he sent that were labeled “gift,” “sweater” or “ladies skirt,” but which instead contained turtles that were bound and taped inside knotted socks or diapers and smeared with minty “toothpaste-like” substances to throw off detection dogs.
Lin exported largely Eastern box turtles and three-toed box turtles, which are native to the United States, authorities said. The creatures, which can reach up to 6 inches long and live for up to a century, have colorful markings that make them desirable to collectors, particularly in parts of Asia where they can sell for $2,000, or up to $20,000 if they have rare markings.
Millions of turtles are traded all over the world each year, with some being eaten or used in traditional medicine, according to Jordan Gray, a spokesperson for Turtle Survival Alliance, a conservation nonprofit. Box turtles, however, are largely sold into the exotic pet trade, he said.
“They are seen by many as status symbols,” Gray said, particularly in Hong Kong and China, which he called “the epicenter of the illegal turtle trade.”
The turtles Lin sold are protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, a United Nations treaty, according to authorities. Many states also prohibit collecting turtles from the wild, but thousands are still poached every year, Gray said.
In October, a woman pleaded guilty to smuggling 29 Eastern box turtles in an inflatable kayak she paddled across a lake from Vermont to Canada. And in March, a man was sentenced to 30 months in prison in California for trafficking around 2,100 turtles to Hong Kong.
The populations of many box turtles have been on the decline in the United States, threatened by habitat erasure or traffic incidents. They are ecologically important to the systems they inhabit, Gray said, but slow to reproduce.
“So, really, every turtle counts,” he said.
Removing even just a few turtles can have a “devastating effect” on an entire turtle population, he added. “It can take an extraordinarily long time for a population to rebound,” he said, “or it may never rebound.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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