Over five years, Southeast Asian authorities recorded at least 259 tiger-related seizures. Only around 42 percent of those incidents, or 110 cases, ended in a conviction carrying prison time or a fine, according to a report by WWF, the GuArdean Centre for Conservation Research and TRAFFIC. The seizures were logged between 2019 and 2024 across the seven tiger range countries of the region.
The report, titled From Seizure to Sentence, says a significant proportion of arrests never reach prosecution or have unknown outcomes. Where suspended sentences are frequent, as in some countries, the penalties send a poor signal. Its authors argue that low fines and suspended terms tell offenders that these are not treated as serious crimes, which keeps the perceived risk low and the reward high.
Country by country
Indonesia and Vietnam account for most of the recorded convictions, partly because their data is better. Thailand and Malaysia tell a different story: 36 and 35 arrests respectively produced prison terms for just five and nine individuals. In Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, thin data and low case numbers make performance hard to judge, though the authors see signs of gaps between detection, arrest, prosecution and sentencing. Across the region, sentencing is inconsistent.
Wild tigers have already vanished from three countries in Southeast Asia over the past 25 years, mostly through sustained hunting and habitat loss.
Small fish in the dock
Those who do reach court are overwhelmingly low- or mid-level figures: hunters, couriers and small traders, some acting under economic pressure or after human-wildlife conflict. Higher-level actors in organised networks appeared largely absent from courtrooms.
The report also found that prosecutors lean almost entirely on wildlife legislation. Public prosecution records in every country studied showed no use of anti-money laundering, corruption, financial crime or organised crime laws, even though tiger trafficking often sits inside wider illicit economies with illegal financial flows and transnational networks.
What Indonesia shows
Indonesia stands out for transparency. Its public court sentencing database let researchers examine 59 cases from January 2015 to June 2025. Strong outcomes there tended to rest on community reporting, undercover operations and targeted surveillance, forensic evidence and coordination among agencies.
The lack of accessible judicial data elsewhere is one of the biggest barriers. Without judgments and case records, it is hard to see why cases fail, find bottlenecks, detect corruption or target training. The report calls for wider use of financial crime laws, better evidence handling, specialised skills for investigators, prosecutors and judges, closer cross-border coordination, and a shift of focus to the people who organise and finance the trade.
