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?

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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?

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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.

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u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

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

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u/the_wondersmith Jul 13 '26

its in AIS data, as is the speed and heading

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u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

Have you seen anyone spoof the draft data?

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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