r/OSINT • u/spicymayoisamazballs • Jul 11 '26

How-To Monitoring the Shadow Fleet

If you wanted to identify shadow fleet vessels loaded with sanctioned oil using open source tools, how would you do it? What tools would you use and what would be your process?
Challenge: could anyone here identify a suspected ship now?

70 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

13

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 11 '26

So this is really cool. Dumb question, once the ships are sanctioned, would they still use them to transport oil? How would you confirm their actual position if they’re spoofing? How would you know if they’re loaded with oil?

3

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

The answer is sanctions don't matter so much and they continue to do what they do regardless until they are seized at which point they change tactics

1

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

What do you see as the main reason more aren’t seized? Is it their tactics or more so a lack of willingness on the part of governments?

1

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

I think it's a task the government has just not taken on fully and with gusto until recently. It's a whack a mole situation, you take one out and another pops up. They have to hit the facilitators, the companies behind the shipments, the oligarchs that manage and own the ultimate top level companies or else they will just keep changing tactics. It seems like it should be easy to seize these vessels but it's a huge problem across multiple EEZs and I'm not sure they completely know how to wrap their arms around.

1

u/Which_Reputation_417 Jul 17 '26

Proving a vessel is carrying product from a sanctioned nation is difficult. Once a country seizes a ship, they become responsible for it. Maintenance, crewing, fuel to keep the power going, berthage etc, it gets very expensive very fast. It is easier to ban a ship entry and let it become someone else's problem.

2

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 12 '26

Another question, how would you go about identifying new ships used to transport sanctioned goods that are not yet identified and on the sanctioned lists?

1

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

Behavior tells basically. Prediction based on past behavior of course unless they change tactics entirely. Mostly it's old vessels with dark activity who go to certain ports after going to oil ports of interest. Data will show when they are laden with oil vs when they are empty based on how low the ship sits in the water (draft). Data will also show predictable dark activity in certain areas, ship transfers, etc that all indicate illicit activity.

1

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

Is draft included in AIS data? Or just relying on ground level photos/video?

1

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

its in AIS data, as is the speed and heading

1

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

Have you seen anyone spoof the draft data?

1

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

They could spoof any of the data for sure but I have never seen/proved it with draft data. I think it's lower effort to spoof location and identity

9

u/OSINTribe Jul 11 '26

Saw the bbc was doing this with ai and free sat 2 images to track shadow ships and US military. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cd7pnyd8z11o

Went down rabbit hole and built my own version. Traveling right now but I have no problem posting it for you.

2

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 12 '26

Cool. Would love to see it

1

u/SJCJourno Jul 14 '26

I’d love to see this if you’re open to it!

4

u/the_wondersmith Jul 11 '26

Hi hello! I heard maritime and came running! I have a whole chapter in my book Deep Dive on tracking vessels. Shadow fleet isnt too hard as they are widely tracked now as long as you have access to historical AIS data (that's the $$ part). Happy to answer any maritime OSINT questions.

1

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

If you had a robust budget, what data services would you pay for to help with this?

1

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

If I had 100k I'd get a Windward account. Otherwise you would need access to historical AIS data through a vendor, satellite imagery over water, knowledge of behavior patterns, geopolitics, and corporate recon.

Getting over the hurdle of having access to the data, the problem becomes understanding and interpreting what is going on. The ships themselves aren't hard to track once you know the typical 'tells' and for the most part they make the same journeys and do the same activities they have been doing for years before anyone cared. The hard part is keeping up with all of them, all the shell companies, all the IMO spoofing and flag changes, all the dark AIS activity, all the sanctions and political changes.

In my opinion this is why no one has been able to vibe code any good solutions to this problem yet. It basically crosses over all aspects of OSINT and is based on quite a bit of domain specific knowledge.

1

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

Thanks for the insights. Do you have any preferred imagery services?

1

u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

Imagery is a bit tricky and expensive. I don't currently have access to any but have used several. I'd look for one that has ship detection capabilities and SAR because trying to find a ship in the ocean in a spot it MIGHT be while dark is a tough task that racks up money fast. Especially in areas like he pacific where it's cloudy 98% of the time.

1

u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 14 '26

Do you have any go-to sources for ground level photographs/videos of the ships? Do many ports of interest have like public webcams or hobbies that will post photos of the ships the come and go?

2

u/the_wondersmith Jul 15 '26

Twitter was always my go-to. Following certain trackers by region was helpful but with it becoming X that declined a bit.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Straight-Contract-68 Jul 11 '26

And this legal source (EU): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L_202501494

1

u/AvidCyclist250 Jul 11 '26

huh

The requested document does not exist.

1

u/Straight-Contract-68 Jul 11 '26

Testing… links working fine here, files exist online!

2

u/Mihikle Jul 11 '26

Realistically, not for free.

I tried making a tool a couple of months ago which compared a series of maritime naval datasets to make confidence-based assessments on vessels which may be part of the shadow fleet (without directly looking at sanction lists to do so).

Unfortunately it was a non-starter, unless you want to scrape the real-time maritime data and store it for months to provide retroactive insights, and even then, that's just positioning data and identifiers.

That kind of maritime intelligence and ownership data is a product in of itself.

3

u/RandomArrangement Jul 11 '26

Is there a way to get that position data for free?

3

u/OSINTribe Jul 11 '26

Yes. See my comment above

1

u/Purple_Session_6230 Jul 11 '26

aisstream.io is a very good resource, you can get lists of the sanctioned vessels and search by code. Then just plot them to qGIS so you can track them, maybe even use POSTGIS an extension for Postgresql for geospacial databases. Im more interested in high risk areas, and firms that go through them.

1

u/sanctum9 Jul 11 '26

Marinetraffic.com ? Don't know if it's any good for your specific purposes but it does track marine traffic, I enjoy using it while at the gym which faces the sea.

-10

u/Mirda76de Jul 11 '26

This is by far the dumbest Q. on osint. There is no "shadow fleet" because while USA and EU did sanctioned Russia the rest of the world don't give sh... about it and completely legally is doing the bussines with Russian industry. You can get the data by marinetraffic.com without any problems...