Between February 2022 and September 2025, Bellingcat staff and volunteers collected, geolocated, and shared more than 2,500 incidents of civilian harm following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

As part of this effort, Bellingcat tested a new machine learning model intended to rank Telegram social media posts on their likelihood of containing incidents of civilian harm. 

This novel methodology dramatically reduced the search and selection time required, freeing researchers to focus on verifying incidents of civilian harm – not just searching for them. 

This piece documents our methodology, ethical considerations and lessons learned in the hope that others researching similar topics can benefit from our work. 

Open source research into civilian harm is still a relatively new field and it presents many challenges – one of the biggest is organising and sorting through the huge volume of user generated content being produced to find what is relevant. 

Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms to identify patterns from large amounts of data and make predictions, can make this task more efficient.

With ongoing conflicts involving large amounts of civilian harm occurring in Sudan, and much of the Middle East, this guide aims to offer those covering these conflicts an example of how machine learning can be used to help find and sort incidents. You can also access the Code Notebook for our model here.

We defined “civilian harm” not just as civilian deaths or injuries resulting from armed conflict, but also the broader and delayed effects on civilians from mental trauma, loss of livelihood, displacement, destruction of infrastructure and more. This definition was informed by the Protection of Civilians book on civilian harm. 

Initial Telegram Dataset 

Each Telegram post containing civilian harm which had already been manually verified by researchers was used to build an initial dataset of confirmed cases of civilian harm, which data scientists call positive instances. We collected a total of 5,848 unique URLs for these Telegram posts. For our manual collection we reviewed posts on relevant Telegram channels, working through oldest to newest posts each day. Assuming that a given post made it to our geolocated incidents list, it meant the researcher who flagged it also looked at the posts that appeared before and after it on Telegram and did not flag those ones, so we selected the 10 posts surrounding the verified civilian harm post as our additional dataset of posts that did not contain civilian harm. After excluding any deleted or duplicate posts, we ended up with 48,545 non-civilian harm posts, our negative instances. 

The choice to overrepresent negative instances aims at better reflecting the real world and increasing data available for model training. 

We enriched each URL with metadata from the Telegram API, such as the time of publication, reactions or textual content. As some of these posts had been deleted, we completed the missing data points with previously preserved versions from our Auto Archiver database, only available for the positive instances.

Feature Engineering

Training a machine learning model requires numerical data, as these models compute a prediction score based on mathematical operations.

We built these by converting raw data from our initial dataset, such as keywords signalling potential civilian harm, into numerical scores (or “features”) that the model could interpret, with the aim of increasing the model’s ability to identify patterns. This process, known as feature engineering, can significantly improve model results because it allows data scientists to suggest explicit context knowledge. 

A full list of features we used to train the model can be found in the code notebook accompanying this piece. Many features were directly inspired by researchers’ input from their experiences manually screening cases of civilian harm by sorting through a set number of Telegram channels and inspecting each post individually.

Several of the features used were directly built from the metadata contained in each Telegram post including media_type, day_of_week; or binary ones: forwarded, edited and reply_to. 

Other features included engagement information: views, forwards, total_reactions, and even individual features for most used emojis including the reaction_crying_face to count emoji.

Converting Text to Numbers 

To embed the experience from the manual collection process, researchers put together a list of keywords both in Ukrainian and Russian that, to them, signalled posts likely to  show civilian harm. For instance, “Шахед” and “КАБ” translated to “Shahed” and “Guided aerial bomb” respectively. We created a numerical feature to count their frequency. 

In addition, we included several generic English-language keywords which meaningfully signalled potential civilian harm, such as “injured”, “school affected” and “hospital affected” that were only used for generating semantic similarity scores. 

A semantic similarity score is a calculation used to determine the proximity in meaning between different words and phrases. To get the semantic similarity between the post text and each of our keywords, we represented each in a list of numbers via a Sentence Transformer model, which converts words into numerical representations called vectors that a computer can understand. 

We then calculated the level of similarity between each vector using cosine similarity, one of the most popular methods for measuring similarity between two pieces of text.

Due to how embeddings work, this calculation results in a figure on a scale from -1 (no semantic proximity) to 1 (same meaning). For example, the words “hurt” and “injured” would have a high similarity score, while “residential” and “injured” would have a negative score as the words are not semantically similar. 

Finally, to enable the model to identify the relevance of each post to civilian harm in Ukraine, we used a multilingual text transformer from the BERT family of language models to represent the entire post’s text as a vector of 768 numerical values. This model can efficiently represent text from many languages in a way that captures meaning: the same sentence in different languages will generate similar embeddings, and trained machine learning models can detect patterns in the embeddings. 

It is important to note that for this initial prototype of a civilian harm detection model, we did not include any features derived from media content such as photos and videos, although that would be a logical next step in attempting to improve model performance.

Selecting, Training and Evaluating Models

With 54,393 rows of 893 numerical features each, we selected four machine learning algorithms to train our predictive models. 

We chose Logistic Regression as a baseline algorithm due to its simplicity. We also selected three other “best in class” models, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM. These choices centred on the interpretability of the models and their ability to work on tabular data of this size. For example, we avoided neural networks due to a lack of interpretability and because those models work best with a larger dataset. 

To genuinely assess the performance of the trained models, we split our dataset into three parts:  

• A training set – the data the models were trained on (60 percent of the full dataset’s rows)
• A validation set – used for an intermediary evaluation when tuning model parameters (20 percent of all rows)
• A test set – hidden for the final performance assessment, so the models were evaluated on unseen data (remaining 20 percent of rows)

We used a stratified split to divide the dataset instead of a random split. This method ensured the proportion of positive instances (i.e. confirmed cases of civilian harm) remained consistent across all three sets at about 11 percent.

To measure the performance of machine learning models, we ran them through the test set and measured the number of correct and incorrect predictions. Models output a likelihood between 0 and 1 that each Telegram post contains civilian harm, and we tried to find a cut-off threshold that leads to a good balance between flagging almost every post (0.1) or flagging very few (0.9). 

There are two main types of evaluation metrics to gauge a model’s prediction power. Recall asserts what fraction of positive instances (i.e. known civilian harm posts) were correctly flagged as such. Precision measures the fraction of posts flagged as civilian harm that are indeed civilian harm posts.

During the training phase, we tuned the models to maximise average precision (PR-AUC), a metric that summarises precision across all recall levels. While this method also accounts for precision, it prioritises recall, which is preferable for this use case as it steers model selection to reduce the number of civilian harm posts that are skipped. 

The following table sorts models from best to worst PR-AUC against a baseline of a coin-flip predictor. ROC-AUC and F1 are two other evaluation metrics included as sanity checks. Simply put, ROC-AUC measures the probability of ranking two instances, one negative and one positive, correctly; F1 balances precision and recall equally and its best cut-off threshold value.

From these results, we selected XGBoost as our final model as it had the best scores when compared across all metrics.

Interpreting the Model

Because these models are interpretable, we can understand which features are the most useful when predicting whether a post includes civilian harm. The above table shows the top 10 features that most strongly signal the XGBoost model to make a decision:

• semantic_keywords_similarity: the semantic proximity between the post text and manually selected keywords “casualties”, “damage” and “civilian harm”
• bert:  the model was able to discern meaning from the text with the same strength as some of the other features in this list – there are three cases of this in the top 10
• reaction_crying_face: reactions with crying face emojis on the post
• group_of_messages: whether a post contains multiple media files
• keywords_in_text: the number of custom Ukrainian or Russian keywords in the post

These results generally tally with what you might expect when selecting Telegram posts for instances of civilian harm, including that posts that generate a lot of emotional engagement and posts using keywords about civilian harm were among those most likely to contain content related to this topic. Not all models had the same top features as XGBoost. In fact, for the Random Forest model the most important feature was the number of crying face emojis present in a post, a soft pattern highlighted by researchers when this methodology was first imagined.

LLM Results and Comparison

Retroactively, we decided to run a sample of the same test dataset through different large language models (LLMs) to gauge their ability to make these same predictions. 

We aimed to include an LLM-generated score as an extra feature for our trained models, which would be captured as relevant if it correlated with the correct predictions. 

To start, we selected two local models, the 1B and 4B variants of Gemma 3 from Google DeepMind, and two cloud-hosted models, Gemini 2.5 flash and Gemini 3.5 flash. With this selection, we hoped to compare results across a wide range of models’ expected performance. 

We generated a 400-row stratified sample (preserving the same proportion of real civilian harm instances) from the test dataset used for the custom models. For each of the four LLM models, we ran two tests: one where only the Telegram post message was sent, and another including both the message and the engineered features (excluding the text embeddings, as the model had direct access to the text). In the prompt for each model, we asked for a score between 0 and 1. We then evaluated the results as we did for the custom models. 

The above table shows that LLMs can indeed extract value from the engineered features. All four LLMs surpassed the baseline Logistic Regression model in our tests, yet none of them performed better than the other custom-trained models, and XGBoost remained the one with the highest PR-AUC. 

Still, Gemini 2.5 Flash performed better than its newer version 3.5 and even achieved a slightly higher best F1 score than any other model. While this is a good result, for the flagging of civilian harm posts, the PR-AUC remains the crucial metric, as it captures the model’s ability to identify infrequent instances of civilian harm while minimising false positives.

Ethical Considerations

Introducing an instrument of automated decision-making into a process of detecting civilian harm brings inherent ethical questions. These include automation bias, or how humans tend to blindly place faith in machine-generated recommendations; algorithmic bias, or how the results of these models echo the same patterns present in the training data, including under- or over-representation of types of civilian harm. 

The decision to test an automated methodology for this particular project came from the fact that there were limited resources for both steps in the process – the detection of potential civilian harm and its actual verification. Historically, we built an enormous backlog of unverified incidents because a lot of time had to be spent on monitoring the most recent events so that potential evidence would be captured and preserved as soon as possible. 

The automation of this process also reduced the exposure of researchers to a significant amount of unpleasant and distressing visual and text content, reducing the burden of exposure to traumatic content. 

For this project, we tried to ameliorate the ethical challenges with a number of strategies including randomly flagging posts not captured by any model, monitoring which features models relied on to make decisions, and by doing historical comparisons of patterns in data. 

Additionally, as stated above, for this initial prototype of a civilian harm detection model we did not include any features derived from the media content itself. In the future, it would be a logical next step in attempting to improve the model performance, to include the media from the posts – but using AI to review actual media comes with additional ethical challenges such as model bias.

Because of the opaque ownership of many LLM companies and their generative nature, the use of LLMs for an extra feature presented additional ethical challenges including privacy and safety concerns considering the sensitive nature of the data. Our model did not rely on LLMs, though we retroactively ran a sample through it. 

How the Model Fits into the Bigger Picture 

After selecting this model, we created a user interface where researchers could view a list of Telegram posts sorted from most to least likely to contain indications of civilian harm. The user interface was designed for quick triage and integration, where a positive confirmation from researchers would instantly send the post to the Auto Archiver (Bellingcat’s tool for preserving digital content) and then transfer it to ATLOS (our internal collaborative verification platform). Bellingcat staff and volunteers could then manually verify incidents. Researcher input was constantly stored so that this data could be used to improve the model in the future. 

Preliminary feedback indicated that the AI model was useful. Not only were we able to reduce time and harm from scouring through dozens of war reporting Telegram channels, researchers also reported that the stream of new posts being added to the verification backlog were capturing real and diverse cases of civilian harm. 

We recognise this model has much room for improvement and is a work in progress. Even though it can illicit diverse civilian harm posts, further tests and improvements (such as improved feature engineering and continuous evaluation) are needed before it can confidently be deployed.

Despite the focus on civilian harm and Telegram (highly popular in Ukraine and Russia), this pipeline is generic and can be adapted to other conflict monitoring tasks. How easily this can be done does depend on how open the social media platform is and whether it is possible to scrape posts from it. Apart from that, it is easy to incorporate new features and data, and cheap to automatically retrain, test and deploy models as the system receives more human input.  

Looking forward, sorting through overwhelming amounts of data in a conflict will continue to be challenging. Hopefully, this methodology can help newsrooms, conflict monitoring organisations, and others find the balance between ethical considerations and resources in order to carry out open source investigations on civilian harm and human rights violations. 

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Editor’s note: This article was updated on July 3, 2026, to include a line outlining that the model described is a work in progress.

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The post How to Use AI to Help Find Civilian Harm appeared first on bellingcat.

Warning: Includes graphic descriptions of animal harm and images of animal parts from the outset.

A Bellingcat investigation has uncovered a Myanmar-based wildlife trafficker who has operated openly across social media for at least six years, claiming to have sold tiger bones, rhino horn, elephant skin and other products from protected and endangered species to customers in Myanmar, China and Thailand.

By analysing hundreds of adverts and customer conversations, Bellingcat traced more than US$21,000 in sales, identified cross-border shipments linked to multiple payment accounts, and geolocated the dealer’s home address. The seller frequently used graphic images to convince buyers that his wildlife products were genuine, sharing footage of animals before and after they were killed as proof of authenticity.

Following this investigation, Meta removed 10 Facebook accounts, WeChat suspended three accounts and revoked their payment functions, TikTok and YouTube each removed one account, and authorities in Myanmar and Thailand said they would examine the findings further.

On December 21 2022, a Facebook account shared a reel of a tiger cub lying unconscious beneath the caption: “Time for winemaking”, followed by several laughing face emojis. Four days later, the same account shared another reel, this time of an adult tiger lying motionless on an orange plastic sheet as a man approaches with a knife.

Two separate videos posted to Facebook by the account known as MB.

The account behind both videos belongs to Mei Ba (hereafter MB), a self-described Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctor based in Myanmar. In TCM, plants and animal products are used to prepare remedies based on established medicinal formulas. These remedies can take many forms, including herbal teas, simmered concoctions, ingredients steeped in wine, and pills. TCM is also sometimes associated with pseudoscientific beliefs, such as the idea that consuming an animal’s organ can nourish the corresponding organ in the human body.

A Bellingcat investigation has found that MB frequently advertises the trafficked parts of critically endangered and vulnerable species to customers in Myanmar, Thailand and China. An analysis of social media posts published by MB over six years found references to sales involving parts of bears, elephants, leopards, musk deer, otters, pangolins, rhinos, seahorses and tigers, all of which are protected species.

Profiting from Protected Species

For at least six years, MB has used ten different Facebook accounts under versions of his name to advertise animal parts and products for sale, including those derived from vulnerable and protected species. 

MB has advertised tiger body parts and products, including skins and wine made from bones. Myanmar’s wild tiger population was last estimated at a minimum of 22 animals (in a 2019 study published before the civil war). Licensed tiger farms, described as being similar to zoos, also operate in the country. However, Myanmar law prohibits the killing of any tiger, wild or captive. 

Bellingcat has also identified adverts offering leopard body parts, including skin, bones and gallbladders, as well as a product described as a “whip”, a euphemism for a penis. Many of the adverts explicitly stated that the body parts came from wild animals. The Indochinese leopard is classified as critically endangered, with fewer than 800 mature individuals believed to remain in the wild across mainland South-East Asia.

MB has advertised body parts and other products derived from Asian elephants, an endangered species, including skin sold in pieces and powdered form, as well as their genitals.

One of MB’s more graphic posts showed a recently killed and butchered moon bear – a type of Asian black bear which is classified as a vulnerable species. MB has also advertised various bear body parts for sale, including paws, heads, gallbladders, bile and fat.

Whole rhino horns, as well as bracelets and medicinal products made from rhino horn, have been advertised by MB. Although rhinos have been extinct in Myanmar since the 1980s, the country remains a known transit route for rhino products moving from India to China and elsewhere in South-East Asia, suggesting the items advertised by MB originated outside Myanmar.

Rhino products as advertised by MB on Facebook. Labels added by Bellingcat.

Under Myanmar law, anyone convicted of killing, possessing or trading a “completely protected species,” or its parts, faces a minimum prison sentence of three years and a fine under a conservation law introduced in 2018. Completely protected species advertised by MB include Asiatic black bears, elephants, leopards and rhinos.

Bellingcat contacted multiple Myanmar government authorities for comment regarding MB’s wildlife trade. The Myanmar embassy in London confirmed receipt of Bellingcat’s request and said it would consult the relevant authorities in Myanmar. 

Convincing Customers

Counterfeits are common in the illegal wildlife trade. Buffalo horn is often carved to resemble rhino horn, while cattle penises are passed off as tiger parts. Much of MB’s promotional strategy therefore focuses on persuading buyers that his products are genuine. 

To market rhino horn, MB has posted images of the items on scales or held up against a light, which he claims demonstrates the texture of genuine horn. For tiger bones, in one post he said that a patch of skin would be left attached to demonstrate their authenticity. 

MB has also posted videos of recent leopard and tiger kills. He has shared footage of live tigers in cages followed by images of the same animals being butchered for their skins, bones, skulls, claws and fangs.

Bellingcat only analysed open source evidence, including social posts, customer conversations, visible transactions and shipping receipts. Therefore, the authenticity and composition of the wildlife products advertised or sold could not be independently verified.

Nevertheless, given the volume and graphic nature of these posts, MB’s ability to operate on Facebook for at least six years raises questions about why his accounts remained active up until Bellingcat contacted Meta.

Evading Platform Moderation

For years, MB has openly advertised his business on Facebook, posting hundreds of adverts across ten profiles and various groups. He often uses coded language, including Chinese-language euphemisms in his comments. 

For example, he uses “eraser” (橡皮) to refer to “elephant skin” (象皮), a Mandarin homophone with characters that are also visually similar, shown below.

MB also uses pinyin, the phonetic system for spelling Mandarin Chinese words using Latin letters. For example, in one post, he abbreviates the pinyin word for “rhino” (xīniú) as “X”, advertising “X horn powder”, and uses “Y” (pinyin: yào) as shorthand for “medicine”. He also frequently uses animal emojis, including tiger, elephant, rhino, deer and bear, to refer to products derived from those animals without naming them directly.

Asked why MB had been able to operate for so long without being banned and how it detects common evasion tactics such as coded language, Meta responded: “Bad actors constantly evolve their tactics to avoid enforcement, which is why we partner with groups and invest in tools and technology to detect and remove violating content.”

Cross-Border Trade

To map the scale of MB’s business, Bellingcat analysed more than 500 screenshots of customer conversations spanning May 2021 to May 2026. Originally taking place on Facebook, Viber and WeChat, these exchanges were later reposted by MB on Facebook.

Often blurred or cropped, the material appears to have been shared as part of a strategy to present MB as a trusted seller who reliably delivers to customers. However, given the content frequently included shipping labels with names and addresses, product descriptions, and price discussions, Bellingcat was able to trace part of MB’s customer base and income. Notably, only content MB chose to repost was available for analysis, meaning the findings represent only a sample of his overall activity. 

Across the dataset, Bellingcat identified more than 150 transactions totalling US$21,000. The United Nations estimated Myanmar’s annual per capita income at between $300 and $430 in 2023.

Bellingcat analysis of MB’s digital footprint showing revenue earned per species by MB. Currency in US$. Trade values are estimated based on yearly average black market exchange rates.

Based on delivery records, Bellingcat identified 119 deliveries within Myanmar, 27 to mainland China, and nine to Thailand. Within Myanmar, shipments were most often sent to shared pickup points in cities or towns, whereas those to China were more frequently sent directly to individual addresses. 

Shipments within Myanmar most often involved small quantities of powders or medicines, such as 3 to 7 g of rhino horn powder or 5 g of bear gall bladder. By contrast, deliveries to China more often included whole animal parts such as rhino horn or tiger bones, or larger quantities of products, including 500 g to 1 kg of elephant skin powder or 10 to 40 bottles of medicine.

MB’s highest-value recorded transaction was to a customer in Yiyang, Hunan Province, China and involved two tiger femur bones weighing just over 2.5 kg. Sold in July 2022, the bones fetched 23,500 Chinese Yuan (US$3,494). The customer was asked to provide a screenshot as proof of payment. MB later reposted this on Facebook, alongside a photograph of the bones wrapped in cling film and a shipping label for Deppon Logistics attached. 

Bellingcat contacted Deppon Logistics for comment, sharing the image and tracking number shown below, but received no response at the time of publication.

Under Chinese law, buying, transporting, or selling protected or endangered species can, in the most serious cases, carry prison sentences of more than 10 years. Asian elephants and wild tigers are listed as “Class 1” protected animals. A permit system does exist for the use of captive-bred tigers, although it remains controversial. 

Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendix I, international trade in any endangered species, including Asian elephants and tigers, as well as their derivatives such as skin powder, scales and bones, is prohibited. China, Myanmar and Thailand are all parties to the treaty. 

Bellingcat contacted the General Administration of Customs of China for comment on MB’s wildlife sales to China but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Bellingcat also found evidence of nine deliveries to Thailand, including a tiger penis and several TCM powders said to contain dog, yak and seahorse, all species regulated by Thai law and protected under CITES.

The Thai Natural Resources and Environmental Crime Division told Bellingcat that it already monitors packages falsely declared as traditional medicine but found to contain protected wildlife parts or ingredients derived from them. Following Bellingcat’s findings on MB’s activities, the division said it would investigate further.

A large proportion of MB’s exports to all three countries were bottles of TCM powders or tablets. For example, a “kidney replenishing medicine” was purported to contain deer, dog, gecko, praying mantis, seahorse and yak, while a “prostate medicine” was said to include deer, seahorse and dog. 

Under Chinese law, all packaged TCMs must carry labels clearly displaying the manufacturer’s name, full ingredient list, production and expiry dates, and information on side effects and safety. None of these details were present on MB’s labels.

Multiple banks accounts

Over six years of reposted conversations with customers, Bellingcat observed MB requesting payments to at least 15 different accounts, including seven via WeChat Pay, two via Alipay and six via third-party bank accounts, which MB described as belonging to friends or family.

For example, in May 2022, a customer purchased 1kg of elephant skin powder to be shipped to Chiuchow, Guangdong Province, China. MB told the customer his WeChat account could not currently receive the payment and instructed them to send the funds to his “sis” [female associate], shown below.

Both WeChat Pay and Alipay’s terms and conditions prohibit the use of their services to receive payments for illegal activities.

After being contacted by Bellingcat, WeChat suspended three accounts, revoking all payment functions and removing associated content. 

Alipay did not respond to Bellingcat’s request for comment.

Identifying MB

MB’s brazen online activities include operating at least ten Facebook profiles, two TikTok accounts, one WeChat account and one YouTube channel. He is the sole administrator of a Facebook group with nearly 1,000 members. Across these platforms, he has amassed some 12,000 followers. 

While using variations of “Mei Ba” (MB) across most of these accounts, he also uses the Chinese name “Mei Xiangfu” on his personal WeChat account. The name “May Kyin Phu” also appears alongside payment QR codes when customers are asked to transfer funds. Below is a QR code for Myanmar’s largest bank, KBZ, which includes what appears to be MB’s legal name: U May Kyin Phu, with “U” used as an honorific equivalent to Mr.

Since 2019, MB has used the same ID photo as his profile picture across multiple platforms, as well as his wedding photo as his TikTok profile picture and Facebook banner image. His wife, identified in the wedding photo and in other images posted by MB, has also been found advertising vulnerable and protected species via her Facebook account.

With more than 3,100 followers, she frequently reposts MB’s adverts while also sharing screenshots of conversations with customers. For example, in one WeChat exchange later reposted to Facebook, she discusses the cash sale of five “real” tiger penises.

From MB’s posts, Bellingcat geolocated a house in Lashio, eastern Myanmar, used to photograph animal parts for sale in his advertisements. MB has posted content from this property since 2020.

In the images below, what MB describes as “leopard gallbladders” can be seen hanging from a balcony, revealing the layout of the property’s backyard and the rooftops of adjacent buildings. Although Lashio is not covered by Street View, the distinctive roof visible in MB’s images matched with user-uploaded photographs on Google Maps.

Bellingcat contacted both MB and his wife for comment on the findings of this report. Both were reached via WeChat and appear to have received the request, but did not reply at the time of publication.

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Data visuals by Galen Reich, Graphics by Merel Zoet, Editor, Claire Press.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here, Instagram here, Reddit here and YouTube here.

The post Rhino Horn, Leopard Skin and Tiger Claws Sold Openly on Facebook appeared first on bellingcat.

This article was co-published with Signal Ohio and STAT.

In high school, Ashley Delgado dreamed of becoming a doctor and one day buying her father a Rolls-Royce. “She wanted to heal people,” said her father, James Taylor. She had a high GPA, Taylor added, and did especially well in science and Latin.

In her mid-20s, Ashley suffered a leg injury and was prescribed OxyContin. The painkiller marked the beginning of a yearslong descent through addiction — from prescription opioids to methamphetamine, then heroin, and finally, fentanyl.

With her family’s support, Ashley spent time in a rehabilitation facility in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and in recovery she moved into a sober living home. But on an early summer morning in 2023, Ashley’s body was found on a dead-end street just outside the city. One sandal was missing. Tucked inside her bra was a folded scrap of paper containing a tan powder. She was 29.

“I have lost my father, my grandmother — that hurts,” Taylor said. “But when you lose your child, that’s the worst thing on the planet, because they’re not supposed to go before you.”

Toxicology tests would later show a mix of substances in Ashley’s system, including protonitazene and metonitazene, powerful synthetic opioids from a little-known class of drugs known as nitazenes. Her death was ruled accidental.

Before his daughter’s fatal overdose, Taylor had never heard of nitazenes. Developed in the 1950s as potential painkillers, the drugs never reached the market because they were deemed unsafe for medical use. He was shocked to learn they could be up to 40 times more potent than fentanyl and 500 times stronger than heroin.

Nitazenes are predominantly sold online, both on the clear web and dark web, and are often laced into other substances to increase their potency. Experts say this puts unsuspecting users seeking more common drugs, such as oxycodone, fentanyl, or stimulants like cocaine, at risk of fatal overdoses.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) started tracking nitazene-related seizures around 2014, but it wasn’t until 2019 that it saw a marked increase. Since then, federal authorities have scheduled dozens of nitazenes as illegal substances, launched undercover operations, filed indictments, and imposed tariffs on China, where many of the laboratories manufacturing and supplying nitazenes and fentanyl are known to reside.  

Yet, figures provided to Bellingcat by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) show the United States has reported 26 different kinds of nitazenes since 2019 — the second highest number globally, after Canada.

And data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on nitazene-involved overdose deaths suggest that cases continue to rise. More than 1,100 fatalities have been confirmed through the CDC’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS), but experts believe the number of Americans who have died from them since 2019 could be as high as 2,000. 

Alex Krotulski, the director of the Centre for Forensic Science Research and Education in Pennsylvania, told Bellingcat that deaths are underreported because nitazenes were not routinely tested for.

“There are only limited forensic toxicology labs that test for nitazenes, so if a nitazene was present and the lab didn’t test for it, the number wouldn’t appear in SUDORS,” he said. “Also, for labs that do test for nitazenes, they have missed cases prior to their testing.” The most recent years for which there is CDC data, 2023 and 2024, show they were the deadliest, with 747 confirmed deaths.

In this months-long open source investigation, Bellingcat combed through dozens of criminal court proceedings, filed national, state, and county-level Freedom of Information requests, and obtained scores of medical examiner reports to produce the most detailed account yet of how nitazenes are infiltrating US borders and destroying lives. 

The investigation found that, despite efforts to curb their spread across the country, nitazenes are proliferating online. It also shows that, by the time nitazenes reach American users, they are almost always mixed with several other drugs, including methamphetamines, cocaine and, most notably, fentanyl. 

As of this year, 48 of 50 US states have reported nitazene seizures.

Less Fentanyl, More Nitazenes

Fentanyl is by far the biggest opioid killer in the US. With more than a quarter of a million deaths since 2021 and about 200 fatalities a day, fentanyl is one of the country’s most urgent public health crises. But drug experts warn that nitazenes can be even more potent and are being mixed with fentanyl and other substances, creating increasingly lethal combinations.

“We’re always concerned about fentanyl being mixed in with other drugs — cocaine, meth, heroin,” said Frank Tarentino, Associate Chief of Operations for the DEA’s Northeast Region. “You add nitazenes to that and it makes it exponentially more dangerous and frightening for drug law enforcement, parents, caregivers, educators, and the young.”

Data obtained from the DEA’s National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS) show reports of confirmed seizures of nitazenes rising sharply — from 43 positive tests in 2019 to almost 2,000 in 2024 (the most recent year for which figures are available). By March this year, more than 8,000 nitazene reports had been recorded since 2019. But experts said that not all laboratories can test for nitazenes — which come in many forms including powders, pills, and sprays — and many don’t feed into the NFLIS system, meaning these numbers are almost certainly an underestimate.

We asked the DEA for a breakdown of reports of nitazenes by state. Ashley Delgado’s home state of Ohio stands out. NFLIS data from 2019 to 2024 indicate that more than a third of all positive nitazene laboratory reports nationally are linked to Ohio. 

Separate data from the CDC shows Ohio has also recorded the highest number of nitazene-related overdose deaths in the US since 2021. In 2020, there were just four fatalities linked to the drug; in 2021 that number rose to 90. Between 2022 and 2024, according to government data, there were 200 more deaths.

“It is a risk to our community,” said AmandaLynn Reese, chief programme officer at Harm Reduction Ohio, a non-profit that supports people who use drugs. “There’s been several instances of nitazenes being reported within the community, and I think we’re going to see more of that, especially as we’re seeing less fentanyl.”

To learn more about what was happening in Ohio, Bellingcat filed a public records request for county-level figures to the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). The data shows that the counties of Scioto, Butler and Cuyahoga — areas long affected by the opioid crisis — account for almost half of all nitazene detections across the state, by weight.

In the 2000s, Portsmouth in Scioto County became known as the “pill mill capital” of America due to widespread overprescribing of opioids. More recent data continue to show Scioto with one of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the state. In Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, drug-related mortality rates tripled the national average in 2022. 

Two years ago, Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine issued executive orders to schedule nine different nitazenes and legalised the use of tools to test for drugs including nitazenes. 

The reasons why Ohio has been so hard hit are still not fully understood. “Ohio’s geography has long been a suspected contributing factor,” said Erin Reed, director of RecoveryOhio, a statewide initiative coordinating Ohio’s response to addiction. The organisation cited a 2001 article pointing to Ohio’s unique geographic and infrastructural features — including vast land, air and sea transportation networks — as key reasons for the state being a hub for drug trafficking. 

Local organisations like Harm Reduction Ohio are pushing for more drug-checking services, education, and greater accessibility to testing strips and life-saving medications like Naloxone, a drug that is used to reverse an opioid overdose. “People are going to use drugs,” Reese said. “We don’t know the supply, but those are ways you can engage in your drug use to increase safety and reduce harm.”

Dealer’s Choice

Bellingcat obtained medical examiner reports from Cuyahoga County for all nitazene-related deaths in 2023 and 2024, which provide an insight into how the drugs are being consumed. The autopsy records show that 45 people — 31 men and 14 women aged 29 to 72 — died after taking nitazenes over the two-year period. Among them were university graduates and former athletes, an Army veteran, an ironworker and an addiction counselor.  

Just before Christmas in 2024, a young man from Cleveland died after taking drugs that included etonitazene. A couple of weeks earlier, the body of an elderly woman was found in her home after she ingested drugs that included metonitazene and protonitazene. In the summer, a mother of two children in her thirties consumed a similar lethal mix. All except one of the 45 deaths was ruled accidental. 

And in every instance, nitazenes were detected alongside fentanyl, and often with a cocktail of other drugs such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines. The reason for this wide variety, Tarentino, the DEA agent said, is that dealers often mix nitazenes into other drugs to make them more powerful and addictive, and ultimately to give them a competitive edge. 

“It becomes a brand,” he said. “The unfortunate circumstance that we find ourselves in is that the dealer’s choice becomes a deadly decision.” Not only are these mixtures deadly — they can also be highly profitable. 

Court records analysed by Bellingcat show nitazenes have been sold at prices ranging from roughly US $4,000 to $12,000 per kilogram. But Tarentino said the DEA’s internal estimate puts $12,000 at the lower end of the range, with prices going up to as much as $40,000. Given their potency, even small quantities can be diluted into hundreds of thousands — or potentially millions — of doses once mixed and pressed into pills. “A little bit can go a long way,” Tarentino said, “and they can make a lot of money.”

A Freedom of Information Act request to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed that in 2024 and 2025 — the only years for which the agency has monitored nitazenes separately — 41 consignments of the drug were intercepted. The data shows that most of these shipments arrived by mail, primarily from mainland China, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. The quantities tended to be small, ranging from less than 1 gram to almost 700 grams. 

But that’s not always the case. An analysis of US federal court records linked to prosecutions of nitazenes indicates that roughly 90 kilograms of material containing nitazenes in different forms (powder and pills) have been seized over the past three years. Nearly two-thirds of that amount, about 60 kilograms, stem from a single case.

In that case, prosecutors allege that a man named Valkar Singh drove a blue Maserati from Canada into the US carrying six industrial-sized buckets with more than 100,000 pills containing  isotonitazene. According to court filings, Singh transported the drugs to a Bronx, New York address, where he was arrested by undercover law enforcement officers. 

Tarentino, who is familiar with the Singh case but could not comment on it specifically, said a lot of work is being done to prevent drugs being smuggled across the Canadian border. “Canada has become a major concern, but also a major partner in trying to stop the synthetic opioids that are coming into the United States,” he said.

Lawyers for Singh, who has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing, declined to comment.

The scale of the alleged seizure makes this case an outlier. Of 46 federal cases identified by Bellingcat between 2021 and 2025, the next highest nitazenes seizure was about 9 kilograms. By comparison, data provided by the European Union Drugs Agency shows roughly 18 kilograms of nitazene-related seizures (pills, powder, liquid) across the EU between 2019 and 2023. 

“It’s very large,” said Jared Brown, scientific affairs officer at the UNODC. “One hundred thousand pills is probably at the limit of what we hear about in terms of maximum types of quantities that get seized.” 

The evidence suggests that most buyers are individual dealers who purchase relatively small quantities online, rather than organised criminal groups. “It’s street-level or mid-level dealers [in the US] that are introducing the nitazenes into the drug supply, not the big drug traffickers,” said Philip Berry, a visiting senior lecturer at King’s College London who formerly worked in counter-narcotics at the UK Home Office.

Court documents show that buyers can easily find nitazene suppliers online: on dark web marketplaces, standalone chemical supplier websites, or even on social media platforms. The suppliers often market the drugs by listing their chemical identifier and social media contact details. Often, the ads include an image of a young Asian woman striking a pose. 

Buyers are often individual dealers who contact sales representatives via encrypted channels and negotiate a deal. In those conversations, representatives will sometimes disclose how they claim to evade customs, for example by declaring the product as cosmetics or electronic accessories.

A detailed account that illustrates this modus operandi comes from the 2023 case against a man named Will Catis in Florida — the state with the second highest number of confirmed nitazene reports. Court documents show that a basic internet search led Catis to multiple nitazene advertisements listed by Jiangsu Bangdeya New Material Technology Co., LTD, a Chinese company sanctioned by the US Treasury for offering illicit substances for sale, including fentanyl and protonitazene.

Catis purchased approximately four kilograms of nitazenes from Jiangsu Bangdeya in batches no larger than 500 grams. The drugs were sent via the US Postal Service to Deerfield Beach, Florida. Once received, Catis mixed the nitazenes with other drugs, pressed the substance into a brick and sold it to other drug traffickers. Catis was jailed for 12 years after pleading guilty to possessing and intending to distribute nitazenes.  

One court case from Florida describes how a couple who lived in a converted garage bedroom in Hernando County bought nitazenes through the mail from Chinese companies they contacted online. Jacob Spinoza and his girlfriend Veronica Jo Barback regularly abused the drugs and distributed them locally, according to court documents. Both pleaded guilty. Spinoza was sentenced to nine years in prison, and Barback received a three-year sentence.

Another notable case reveals how a man allegedly ran a drug trafficking operation from a prison in Ohio. Investigators said Brian Lumbus Jr worked with a middleman, Giancarlo Miserotti, who contacted drug manufacturers in China to get nitazenes shipped through Italy to avoid custom checks. Once in Ohio, the plan was to distribute the drugs to other states, court documents said. 

But law enforcement agents were listening in on conversations between Lumbus and other members of the drug network, who expressed caution about the potency of nitazenes. “Man, we got to be careful … somebody died,” Lumbus said in one phone conversation, according to court documents. “Ohhh … it was too strong,” Miserotti responded. “I think the ratio of the pink [metonitazene] was thick.” 

Lumbus is awaiting trial. Miserotti was arrested in Italy in 2023 and sentenced to more than 13 years in prison. 

Arms Race

Enforcement actions have targeted the online marketplace ecosystem. In June 2025, Archetyp Market, a major dark web platform used to sell drugs, was dismantled in a coordinated operation involving Europol. US authorities have also indicted several China-based companies and individuals accused of offering nitazenes and related synthetic opioids for sale. Still, advertisements for nitazenes continue to litter online markets, constantly adapting to new regulatory regimes.

In July 2025, China placed the majority of nitazenes under national control. Tightened regulations — both in China and the US — have tried to stem the flow of nitazenes. But drug experts warn that manufacturers are already exploiting loopholes in China’s regulations by marketing chemically similar synthetic opioids known as “orphines.” 

Jared Brown, of UNODC, said orphines are also thought to come from China and are about as powerful as fentanyl. “Orphines have just enough of the molecule difference that it isn’t covered by the core definition that China has made,” he said. 

This is not the first time Chinese synthetic opioid manufacturers have adapted to regulations. In 2019, China banned all fentanyl-related substances, including some major precursors. The number of distinct fentanyl analogues reported to the UNODC subsequently plummeted, while reports of nitazenes quickly picked up. Now that China is clamping down on nitazenes, orphines are on the rise. More than 150 cases involving orphines were reported in the US between 2024 and 2025, the majority of which are in Illinois.

“Always adapting, always changing – we call them ‘shape shifters’,” said Tarentino. “They’re this global Hydra that are always changing, evolving and adapting to their environment and taking full advantage of all of these different loopholes and vulnerabilities that exist.”

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Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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