DARK SHIPPING! The rise of shipping vessel identity laundering!
This article was prompted originally by a 56-page report from C4ADS, a Washington DC based non-profit organisation which has set itself the goal of highlighting data-driven analysis and evidence-based reporting of conflict and security issues worldwide. I came across a piece summing up the report in GTR and subsequently in Splash247. What drew my attention to it was the whole concept of laundering the identity…not just of the money…but of a whole ship…and I thought it was worth writing about. This is not the same as money laundering, at least, not directly. However, it does nevertheless utilise elements of the three basics of money laundering, namely placement, layering and integration. Thereby making something seem legitimate which on closer inspection…and in this case you would sometimes need to really dig deeply…you will find all is not what it seems.
Identity tampering of vessels is not a new thing, it has been around for hundreds of years. In recent years, some operators have gone to some great pains to try and hide the identity of their ships or ‘vessel spoofing’ as I’ve heard it called. This has been a feature of tankers trying their luck at shipping Iranian crude oil and products around U.S. and international trade sanctions. The stages have involved such things as forged shipping documents, impersonating another vessel, the temporary disabling or manipulation of a vessel’s AIS signal (Automatic Identification System) plus UAE and elsewhere based front companies, all in the attempt to evade these sanctions. These incidents have been well documented in the media, but now there is an increasing level of sophistication coming through, which has seemingly successfully duped the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) on possibly up to eleven occasions. This Vessel Identity Fraud of a whole ship…at the IMO…hits at the core of the cataloguing and management of the whole global shipping fleet, and it has been apparently orchestrated from one place…North Korea!
THERE ARE TWO WAYS THIS IS CARRIED OUT. In the first case, known as the Direct Vessel Identity Laundering Operation, sees a ‘dirty’ vessel, that is one that is known to have been involved in the past by authorities to be a sanctions buster, undergo extensive modifications to disguise it. The next step, is to create a ‘shell identity’. This part is where the fraud with the IMO takes place. The modified ‘dirty’ vessel is now presented as a new build and the operators apply for a new IMO registration, a fraudulent registration…on a ship that does not really exist. The final step is when the ‘dirty’ old ship becomes the ‘clean’ newbuild, and assumes its identity. The North Koreans are believed to have tampered this way with the process of IMO registration and in one instance passed off a thirty-year-old ship as a new build.
THIS HITS AT THE CORE OF THE WHOLE GLOBAL FLEET!
8 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | Q4 Edition 2021
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30
