Police caught a man from Texas attempting to sell rare baby spider monkeys on Facebook. They sentenced 33-year-old Sarmad Ghaled Dafar to four months in custody. Not just for putting them up for sale, but for smuggling them over the Mexican border, according to the New York Post.
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Man Caught Smuggling And Selling Rare Baby Spider Monkeys
On top of that, they ordered Dafar to serve six months of home confinement. He also has to pay $23,501.70 in restitution to cover the cost of quarantining three of the six monkeys.
Dafar smuggled the baby spider monkeys across the border both in June 2022 and July 2023. Police managed to get a record of a Facebook message he sent to a customer. "I have monkey coming in 2 week baby monkey...Is a spider monkey," he wrote.
"[I'll] let you know when it is here because they gonna send it to me from California." Dafar then said these kinds of spider monkeys usually go for 15,000, but he asked for 8,000 instead.
With another customer, Dafar allegedly sent them different photos of the monkeys. One of the photos sent in August 2023 showed the baby endangered monkeys wearing diapers.
"This crime ripped weeks-old baby monkeys from their mothers, disrupted fragile ecosystems, endangered a vulnerable species, and posed significant public health risks," said US Attorney Adam Gordon. "This is not merely an economic crime; it is a severe and lasting injury to both wildlife and public safety."
Dafar even made fun of other spider monkey smugglers in these messages. He called the suspect caught on August 6, 2023, smuggling seven baby monkeys "stupid."
Despite how highly he thought of himself as a smuggler, it didn't last long. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents intercepted one of Dafar's coconspirators smuggling the three monkeys, according to NewsNation.
These endangered animals were taken to the San Diego Zoo, half of them quarantined. The law requires animals like these monkeys to be quarantined to prevent the spread of diseases. By now, these three quarantined monkeys are at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.
They named the three monkeys who share the same mother, Chrissy, Jack, and Janet. We don't yet know what happened to the other non-quarantined monkeys.
Plug in the electric chair!