If you often buy and/or sell on eBay, then why not spend five minutes checking out any real seahorse(s) for sale and reporting them? It takes about three minutes to report any illegal sales you may see, and REALLY helps The Seahorse Trust in its work! (and please use the donate button and select The Seahorse Trust for us when you trade on E-bay, it all helps to keep the work going)
As you know, we have an ‘insider’ (affectionately known as Agent K) who regularly checks and then reports eBay ads, but even she is infallible and sometimes things like work, home or horses (her other passion!) prevent her from checking as often as she’d like. This is where YOU come in!
Just search on ‘seahorse’, ‘seahorse keyrings’, ‘seahorse lucite’ and ‘seahorse paperweight’ to see if you can spot any listings of real seahorses being sold within the UK or from abroad – but deliverable to the UK and Europe. Even while other countries still sadly allow the sales of seahorses within their own country, it is still ILLEGAL to sell them to buyers within Europe.
The ‘Report item’ button is on the right-hand side before the main text of the advertisement (to the right of the Postage tab). Just click on this, then on the ‘Prohibited and restricted items‘ category, then ‘Animals, plants and wildlife‘ for the report reason, and finally ‘Animals, animal parts, pelts or skins’ for the detailed reason. Click on Continue and then click on ‘Send report‘. All done, thank you!
If eBay gets a few duplicate notifications of illegal advertisements, then they may decide to tighten up on their filters that are supposed to prevent such ads appearing in the first place.
You also have the opportunity to give feedback at the bottom of any sales listing pages, so we’d urge you to politely point out that it is illegal for any real seahorse sales to be advertised on the UK version of eBay.
During 2014 alone, 100 illegal UK seahorse sale advertisements have been reported to eBay, with a further 92 being reported from foreign sellers trying to sell within Europe.
In the much shorter period of 20/9/13 to 31/12/13, a total of 148 ads were reported, so we ARE making a difference by informing eBay, who then withdraw the ad and therefore put off other would be sellers too!
Thank you for any help you are able to give then report sightings (on E-bay and elsewhere to Agent K on illegaltrade@localhost
Best wishes ‘Agent K’
