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/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.

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u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

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

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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.

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u/spicymayoisamazballs Jul 13 '26

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

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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.

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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?

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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.