How ‘spoofing’ kept Venezuelan tanker hidden in the shadows for YEARS fuelling Maduro’s regime

FOR years it was a ghost ship at sea, hauling sanctioned oil, dodging trackers and feeding tyrant Nicolas Maduro’s regime.

This week, it was finally hunted down and seized in a gun-to-deck US raid off Venezuela.

The tanker Skipper survived by lying. Not by switching off its tracker, but by deliberately falsifying it.

Such technique is known as “spoofing”, which allowed the vessel to roam the oceans unnoticed while moving millions of barrels of illicit crude.

Tom Sharpe OBE, a retired Royal Navy commander and maritime security expert, said spoofing is a calculated act of deception.

He told The Sun: “It involves the AIS, which is an automated identification system transponder.

“And it involves falsifying the information that you are giving from that system.

“So it’s different from jamming. It’s different from turning it off. This is a proactive attempt to hide or to see who you are and where you’re going.”

Years in the dark

Skipper changed names, switched flags and vanished from tracking systems as it ferried oil from sanctioned states including Venezuela and Iran.

Analysts estimate it transported nearly 13 million barrels since 2021 – revenue that helped keep Maduro afloat despite international sanctions.

Even being sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2022 failed to stop it.

In November, the tanker was loaded with more than one million barrels of crude at Venezuela’s Jose Oil Export Terminal.

Days later, with its AIS switched off, it carried out a ship-to-ship transfer in the Caribbean in a classic shadow-fleet trick to disguise the oil’s origin.

When US forces finally intercepted it, Skipper was broadcasting a false location more than 400 miles away and fraudulently flying the flag of Guyana.

Sharpe said AIS spoofing is only the most obvious layer of concealment.

He explained: “There is an extraordinary amount of emphasis being placed on AIS as a detection method, but there are other ways of detecting ships.

“And flag state and obfuscating on your paper trail and your insurance and who owns you and who verifies you.

“These are very, very complex systems and you can cheat basically all of them, should you so wish.”

Shadow fleet feeding dictators

The tanker was part of a vast “ghost” or “shadow” fleet moving oil for sanctioned regimes.

“They’re essentially uninsured,” Sharpe said.

“They’re quite often stateless. They’re quite often flagless… there’s this very sort of opaque ownership, line of ownership.”

Once dominated by Iran and North Korea, the dark fleet has exploded since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“That fleet has gone, is turbocharged,” Sharpe explained.

“It’s the Iranian dark fleet, but on steroids. And there’s now hundreds, if not thousands of vessels.”

Some are so toxic they are abandoned at sea, drifting uncrewed with oil still onboard.

Why the US struck now

The seizure itself was extraordinary.

US commandos rappelled from helicopters launched from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford, storming the tanker with guns drawn in a coordinated operation involving the Coast Guard, FBI and Homeland Security.

Sharpe said the US had the surveillance muscle to make it happen.

“They have got almost the sort of ultimate surveillance set up in that ocean now,” he said.

“They’ve got everything they need to determine where it’s come from, what its patterns are, what its operating history is, and therefore why it was a legitimate target to seize this time.”

The raid comes as the Trump administration tightens the noose around Maduro, building the largest US military presence in the region for decades and escalating from drug-boat strikes to direct action against oil exports – the lifeblood of Venezuela’s dictatorship.

Maduro has raged about “piracy”, vowing to kick in the teeth” of America after the seizure.

But Donald Trump was blunt, saying the tanker was seized “for a very good reason”.

Warning shot to the world

Sharpe was clear that one seizure will not end the shadow fleet.

“It’s not going to arrest any sort of macro trends,” he said.

“But if it becomes the start of something, if this is the start of a campaign against these vessels, then maybe it could.”

The real weapon, he argued, is uncertainty.

“All it has to do is inject that uncertainty in the operators of these ships and in the mind of Putin and for it to have an effect because it’ll impose a cost.”

And that message now may echo far beyond the Caribbean, including in European waters.

“What does this now mean for our legal ability to tackle Russian dark fleet ships transiting through UK and European waters?” Sharpe asked.

“So I think there’s a really interesting month now as our lawyers and our system wrestles with what’s just happened off Venezuela.”