How dark-fleet ships use digital tricks to disappear – and how to find them
An oil tanker seized by the US this week reportedly used a technology that tracked its location, but new advanced visual tracking could help uncover the true coordinates of such ships.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi
An oil tanker was seized us Army This week off the coast of Venezuela has shed light on a technique that experts say so-called dark-fleet ships often use to conceal their location. This method, known as “spoofing”, involves manipulating a ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS), a radio tracker that broadcasts its position and identifiers to other ships and ports. Instead of broadcasting its real-time coordinates, a spoofing ship sends a fake location.
The tanker, previously sanctioned for alleged smuggling in 2022, is a large crude carrier with a capacity of at least 1.1 million barrels of oil. When it was seized, it was reportedly sailing under the flag of Guyana, although the Government of Guyana has stated that it is not authorized to do so. US officials have not disclosed how they found the tanker. but according to windward– a large maritime data company – is believed to be part of a “dark fleet” network of tankers that secretly carry sanctioned oil around the world using deceptive tactics such as false flags or AIS manipulation.
AIS is mandated by international law for large ships above a certain tonnage. But dark-fleet oil tankers have long manipulated this to avoid scrutiny, says Matt Smith, chief U.S. oil analyst at global trade analysis firm Kpler.
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Smith noted that the seized tanker’s AIS signal was obfuscating its location in late October, with broadcasts reporting the ship’s position as off the coast of Guyana. But satellite imagery told a different story – the ship was actually near Venezuela. “Basically, we have the images to know that this is not where he said it was,” says Smith. In addition to satellite imagery, he says, officials can also get information from port agents, ship brokers, vessel lineups and other sources to determine where tankers and their cargo are and where they are headed.
TankerTrackers.com, a company that tracks global crude oil shipments, is using advanced visual tracking to photograph and locate thousands of tankers around the world. Company co-founder Samir Madani says this has enabled TankerTrackers.com to create its own visual search engine to rapidly identify tankers. This approach helps determine whether a tanker is falsifying its AIS location: Company analysts can look at the tanker’s location in satellite imagery and then compare that information to where the ship’s AIS signal claims it is. If there is a mismatch, the ship is almost certainly cheating.
So while some tankers are still successfully deploying spoofing, new tracking technology is making this trick harder to pull off.
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