Two men were busted for poaching more than 4,000 Florida turtles worth $200,000 and illicitly selling them overseas in a massive moneymaking operation, authorities said.

Michael Boesenberg, 39, and Michael Clemons, 23, both of Fort Myers, were busted in what has been declared “the state’s largest seizure of turtles in recent history,” the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said in a statement Friday.

Authorities launched an undercover investigation after they were tipped off to the trafficking operation back in February 2018, according to the commission.

The thousands of turtles — illegally taken and sold over a six-month period — included Florida box turtles, striped mud turtles, Gulf Coast spiny softshell turtles and diamondback terrapins.

Those turtles had an estimated black market value of $200,000, authorities said.

Depending upon the species, the turtles sold wholesale for up to $300 each and retailed for as much as $10,000 each in Asia, investigators found. The alleged poachers racked in an estimated $60,000 from turtles sold in only one month.

Investigators determined that “a ring of well-organized wildlife traffickers” caught and sold wild turtles to large-scale reptile dealers and shipped most of them overseas — typically to the Asian pet market, authorities said.

Bosenberg is accused of directing people to collect the turtles in bulk and once he had enough, he’d sell them to a buyer with links to the Asian markets, according to the commission.

“The illegal trade of turtles is having a global impact on many turtle species and our ecosystems,” commission executive director Eric Sutton said in the statement. “We commend our law enforcement’s work to address the crisis of illegal wildlife trafficking.”

The alleged poachers received mostly cash but occasionally traded the animals for marijuana products, authorities said.

Each of the seized turtles were evaluated for health and species identification — and 600 of them were returned to the wild, the commission said. Two dozen were quarantined and released at a later date, and a handful were retained by a captive wildlife licensee because they were not native to the region.

Among the freed turtles, nearly 300 are part of a long-term monitoring project by the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, authorities said.

“Wild turtle populations cannot sustain the level of harvest that took place here,” Brooke Talley, the commission’s reptile and amphibian conservation coordinator, said in the statement. “This will likely have consequences for the entire ecosystem and is a detriment for our citizens and future generations.”