Wildlife officials have been tracking the sale of rare New Zealand animals on the internet to monitor values and smuggling trends.
New Zealand geckos, weta and tuatara are highly sought after by international collectors of rare animals.
Among the most valuable are Stewart Island's threatened harlequin geckos, which canfetch $25,000 a pair, and the tuatara, worth $13,000 each.
Wildlife crime will be discussed at the first Interpol conference to be held in New Zealand, starting tomorrow.
Forty delegates from 20 countries will assemble in Auckland for the three-day conference, which is the 16th meeting of the Interpol working group on wildlife crime.
New Zealand will be represented by a Wildlife Enforcement Group comprising staff from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Department of Conservation and Customs.
An investigator for DoC, Peter Younger, said New Zealand had the same wildlife crime problems as many other countries, but on a smaller scale.
Roughly two people a year were caught trying to smuggle rare animals through our borders, and there seemed to be a growing demand for weta, he said.
It was hard to gauge the extent of the smuggling problem and its impact on New Zealand fauna.
But investigators had tracked sales of New Zealand animals overseas.
"They are often advertised on websites for sale, so you can pick them up there. We get a lot of pricing from websites."
Mr Younger said the most common wildlife being smuggled in were bird eggs, either for re-export or for domestic collectors.
Last November, Roy Nichols and Scott Piggott were jailed for smuggling parrot eggs into the country.
In May 2001, Stanley Gover, of Waihi, was caught at Heathrow Airport, England, with 50 parrot eggs strapped to his body.
In February 2001, German tourist Jorg Kreutz was fined $12,000 after two geckos were seen wriggling in his underpants at Auckland Airport.
On Friday, the Herald found a website advertising New Zealand falcons for sale in the United States for between $1650 and $5000 each.
