Indonesian Police Investigating Baby-for-Sale Listing on Shopping Website

Credit: Gawker.com

An unfortunate incident marred Indonesian e-commerce site Tokobagus during New Year’s Eve when someone tried selling a baby on the online shopping website. While the post was taken down by TokoBagus immediately on January 1st, now the police is starting an investigation into who actually made that post.

Tribunnews cited TokoBagus managing director Michal Klar yesterday as saying that human trafficking issues such as this one have to be fought seriously and that they will fully cooperate with the Indonesian cyber crime police unit in investigating this problem. TokoBagus is also working together with related parties like the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) regarding this issue.

To register as a TokoBagus member, you can sign up with a vaild email address or log in using a Facebook account. After putting in your identification details, anyone can start posting their ads on the TokoBagus site. There were a lot of TokoBagus employees who were on holiday during the incident and it took some time for the remaining IT administrators to check the 80,000 products that were uploaded during that time. This incident can happen to any C2C marketplace, and in fact this has happened before to Chinese e-commerce site Taobao a few years ago. We hope that a swift response from Indonesian authorities can help deter future offenders from doing the same crime again.

Looking past this particular incident, 2012 was a great year for TokoBagus. The e-commerce platform won numerous awards and was the second most searched Indonesian brand on Google according to Google Zeitgeist.

(Source: Tribunnews via Detik)