A new report by Global Witness, quoted by Art of Jewellery, claims that diamond smugglers are using social media platforms – including Facebook and WhatsApp – to smuggle diamonds out of the Central African Republic (CAR) and into numerous international markets.
A Global Witness employee, posing undercover as a diamond trader for a year, found that “sellers and middlemen [in CAR] were tagging potential buyers in Facebook posts and then using private messages to develop relationships and negotiate deals”. In 2016, The Kimberley Process (KP) readmitted CAR into the Kimberley Process, permitting it to resume exports from certain regions as long as they compiled with “regulations to prevent conflict-diamond trading”.
However, Global Witness now claims that smugglers were managing to move diamonds “with ease” past all the checks, and smuggling them across international borders.
