A decade after Facebook played a role in toppling regimes in the Arab Spring, opportunistic tomb raiders have turned to the platform to sell antiquities stolen in the wake of those uprisings.

The social network, which is one of several social media platforms credited with turbo-charging communication that fuelled the uprisings of the Arab Spring, has become a thriving marketplace for antiquities from Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Tunisia on Arabic-language pages or private groups.

Statues from the ancient UNESCO-listed site of Palmyra, Syria, the spoils of unrest, can be seen in pictures lying on what appears to be somebody's living room floor.

Lydian gold coins from Turkey and ancient cuneiform tablets can also be bought and potentially shipped to your door.

But now a small team of volunteers in the US and in Europe has infiltrated dozens of Facebook pages in an attempt to track the priceless objects before they disappear into private collections.

Working under the title the ATHAR Project, the group has found a vast volume of antiquities on offer, leading them to conclude the end of the caliphate has not spelled the end of terrorists trafficking antiquities.

ATHAR — an acronym for Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research but also the Arabic word for antiquities— is monitoring public Facebook groups and has infiltrated 96 closed groups dedicated to antiquities trafficking.

Co-founder Katie Paul said so far they had fully recorded the entire history of four private groups.

"It doesn't sound like much, but it took about a year [and] about 3,000 screenshots. That's a lot of time staring at a computer going painstakingly through posts," she said.

"How to loot" instructional videos and advice as to what looters should look for can also be found in the closed groups that have up to 150,000 members.

Gold coins and cuneiform tablets listed for sale by a Facebook user from Iraqi Kurdistan who now lives in Dortmund, Germany. ( Supplied )

Inside the black market

Ms Paul is an anthropologist based in Washington DC who, in addition to her busy day job, has taken it upon herself to investigate cultural property trafficking and its connection to transnational crime and terrorism.

She has found connections between several dozen known traffickers with very well-known American dealers via their Facebook friendship lists.

"This is not just a transnational network, it's global," she said.

Ms Paul said the market typically worked in two ways. Looters find items which they then photograph and advertise. Also, dealers put out the word they have buyers eager for specific items.

She is capturing information about the seller, possible buyers who openly message them, the time, date, location, images of what the item looks like and how it is presented. She said people occasionally revealed details like their addresses and phone numbers during discussions.

If, after having been warehoused, the antiquity ends up being offered for sale in the west or is acquired by a public institution, ATHAR will have a record of its illegitimate origins.

"The reason we're focusing specifically on Arabic language is because almost every single country in the Arab League has a flat out ban on the antiquities trade," Ms Paul said.

"That means if an artefact is being offered out of Egypt or Jordan or Tunisia, it's illegal."

In addition to looting, Islamic State fighters also destroyed priceless artefacts, such as these museum exhibits in Mosul which date back thousands of years. ( Reuters )

That does not mean only people from the Arab world are using Facebook this way. Individuals from the US, Norway, Sweden and Germany are part of the groups being monitored.

Black markets are notoriously difficult to track, but ATHAR is attempting to break new ground with its research.

"There can be anywhere from 1,000 to 150,000 members in a group. Several groups we are monitoring have over 150,000 members, growing at a rate of more than 200 new members per day," Ms Paul said.

"These groups conduct discussions in Arabic [but] users come from as far away as North America and Europe in addition to the vast base of users from across the Middle East and North Africa," she said.

The ATHAR Project is doing the hard yards now in an attempt to safeguard a record of the treasures for the future.

"A lot of what we're seeing is coming straight out of the ground. So there's no record of it previously existing, but if we have this, it's really the first record," Ms Paul said.

Sorry, this video has expired Satellite images show destruction of Egyptian archaeological area ( Katie A. Paul )

Mapping the looting network

Islamic State was known to have part-funded its reign of terror with antiquities looted from Syria, prompting the FBI to send memos to museums and dealers seeking to stamp out the trade.

But analysis of the groups tracked by ATHAR has revealed at least three extremist groups aside from Islamic State are actively involved in antiquities trafficking in Syria.

"When we started, it was really just to understand and record as much information as possible. It's the first real-time data [on fresh antiquities trafficking] we've ever had," Ms Paul said.

"When it comes to antiquities as a source of financing for terrorist groups, ISIS created the wheel, now other groups are adopting the same methodology."

ATHAR is able to map looting networks from finders, to middlemen, to the high-street dealers known to trade with private collectors and some of the world's leading institutions.

"We began systematically recording Facebook group data in the fall of 2017, but my co-director of the project, Dr Amr Al Azm has been trying to raise alarm on the trafficking of antiquities on Facebook since 2015," Ms Paul said.

Ms Paul recently presented a report on ATHAR's findings to a workshop hosted by Stockholm University called Investigating and Policing Antiquities Trafficking and Forgery in a Digital Age.

Stockholm University's Dr Damien Huffer told the workshop the traffic in human remains was also thriving on social media.

ATHAR will this month publish a report that shows a connection between the rapid uptake of Facebook throughout the Middle East and the desecration of cultural sites.

"Looting is one of the oldest professions in the world next to prostitution. We know the ancient Egyptians designed their tombs so tomb raiders ... couldn't access them it," Ms Paul said.

"Facebook has really democratised and sped-up the process. Before, there would be somebody who knew somebody that could get that material to Jordan or get that material to Turkey.

"One new group was created on May 9 and already had over 5,300 members less than three weeks later [as of May 29]."

'The perfect toolkit'

Social media is proving to be a great tool for organised crime that negates the need for advanced search skills or the cloak offered by the dark web.

"Facebook is the perfect tool kit for a trafficker" Ms Paul said.

"You have encrypted messaging within the platform, or you can shift to WhatsApp which is another encrypted messenger owned by Facebook.

"You can buy ads and share advertisements [and] you can locate people through encrypted Messenger.

"Now, Facebook is going to create their own cryptocurrency, which adds a whole other potential level of threat.

"We want policy change. There needs to be proper regulation for social media and Facebook needs to take proactive steps to keep these things from happening."

ATHAR has not reported the looting sites to the social media giant because of Facebook's all care, no responsibility approach to publishing, according to Ms Paul.

"Facebook will shut down pages and not share data. We want to understand the networks and patterns taking place and that information is lost as soon as these pages are deleted," she said.

The ABC asked Facebook's Australia spokesman if the company was aware it was being used for antiquities trafficking.

He said: "If it's not been reported to us, it can be difficult to locate it so we can take appropriate action."

Ms Paul said any "appropriate action" that involved taking down the offending pages would be counter-productive to research on the trade because evidence would be lost and the trade would resurface elsewhere.

Facebook's spokesman said: "If something is reported to us and it's deemed to violate one of our policies, we can take action."

He said privacy laws prevented Facebook actively reporting activities taking place on its site.

Michaela Boland attended the conference Investigating and Policing Antiquities Trafficking and Forgery in a Digital Age in April as a presenter and guest of Stockholm University.