How Dark Fleet ships use a digital trick to disappear and how to find them
An oil tanker seized by the US this week was reported to have used technology that encrypted its location, but new advanced visual tracking could help reveal the true coordinates of such ships.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi
Oil tanker hijacked US forces Off the coast of Venezuela this week, light was shed on a technique that experts say is often used by so-called dark fleet ships to hide their location. Known as “spoofing,” the technique involves manipulating a ship's Automatic Identification System (AIS), a radio tracker that broadcasts its location and identifiers to other ships and ports. Instead of transmitting its coordinates in real time, the spoofing ship sends a fake location.
The tanker, which was previously sanctioned for alleged smuggling in 2022, is a large carrier of crude oil with a capacity of at least 1.1 million tons. barrels of oil. When it was confiscated it was reportedly floating under the Guyanese flag, although the Guyanese government has stated that it does not have the authority to do so. US officials have not disclosed how they found the tanker. But according to Windward sideis a large marine data company. She is believed to have been part of a network of “dark fleet” tankers that secretly transport sanctioned oil around the world using deceptive tactics such as fake flags or AIS manipulation.
AIS is provided for by international law for large vessels above a certain tonnage. But dark-fleet oil tankers have long manipulated this to avoid scrutiny, says Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler, a global trade analysis firm.
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Smith notes that the hijacked tanker's AIS signal imitated its location in late October, with the broadcast incorrectly indicating the ship's location off the coast of Guyana. But satellite images told a different story – the ship was actually located near Venezuela. “Essentially, we have images that show that this was not where it was said to be,” Smith says. Outside satellite imagesHe adds that officials can also obtain information from port agents, ship brokers, ship convoys and other sources to track where tankers and their cargo are and where they are going.
TankerTrackers.com, a company that tracks crude oil shipments around the world, uses advanced visual tracking techniques to photograph and track thousands of tankers around the world. This allowed TankerTrackers.com to create its own visual search engine for quickly identifying tankers, says Samir Madani, co-founder of the company. This approach helps determine whether a tanker is faking its AIS location: the company's analysts can determine the tanker's location in satellite imagery and then compare that information to where it is according to the ship's AIS signal. If there is a discrepancy, then the ship is almost certainly counterfeit.
So while some tankers are still successfully using spoofing, new tracking technologies are making this gambit difficult to pull off.
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