Name: The U.S. Crackdown Strangling the Illicit Network of Dark Fleet Tankers
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T17:00:00Z
Duration: 6 min 37 s
Description: Over 1,400 so-called dark fleet ships have moved sanctioned oil for years. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday breaks down how these tankers evade scrutiny and how the Trump administration has created a playbook for a global crackdown on shadow fleet vessels.

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Over 1,400 so-called dark fleet ships have moved sanctioned oil for years. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday breaks down how these tankers evade scrutiny and how the Trump administration has created a playbook for a global crackdown on shadow fleet vessels. Illustration: WSJ/Ryan Trefes

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260121/936e911e-4a1b-4e7d-90a5-8114be12d951/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Over 1,400 so-called dark fleet ships have moved sanctioned oil for years. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday breaks down how these tankers evade scrutiny and how the Trump administration has created a playbook for a global crackdown on shadow fleet vessels.

The U.S. Crackdown Strangling the Illicit Network of Dark Fleet Tankers

Shelby: Across the globe, billions of dollars of black market oil moves through a network of aging tankers known as the dark fleet. From high tech signal spoofing to old school disguise, these vessels employ shadowy tactics to bypass international law. But a new US crackdown on Venezuelan oil is finally moving to strangle this illicit trade.

The dark fleet model, for now, with Venezuela, has been broken.

The so-called dark fleet is a network of some 1,400 ships that transfer Venezuelan, Russian, and Iranian oil in violation of US and other international sanctions. Analysts say about 1/5 of the world's oil is shipped by the dark fleet.

These tankers have been absolute cash cows for the unknown hidden people, you know, behind all of this trade.

Shelby: These vessels use a variety of deceptive tactics to avoid detection by maritime authorities. First, there's spoofing, when a ship broadcasts its location from one place, but is actually thousands of miles away.

Venezuela has been, you know, the OG of spoofing. They've been doing it since at least 2020.

Shelby: Vessels sailing from Asia often hit the Cape of Good Hope and suddenly cut their transponders to vanish from global tracking, known as going dark.

Michelle: And then it will start spoofing and it will appear to go up to Lome, Togo, when in reality it continues sailing to Venezuela, loads its cargo. And then when it's ready, it's sailing back, all of a sudden, that vessel will appear to come down off West Africa. The tanker will also say that it's gonna call off Angola, for example, and it's all about deceptively trying to hide the fact that it's loaded Venezuelan oil.

Shelby: Second, vessels will use covert ship-to-ship transfers once they vanish from the digital map, like this one caught on a satellite image in the South China Sea.

Ship-to-ship transfers are quite common in shipping, but they're done within port state limits and with port state authority. But this is done in international waters to avoid scrutiny.

Shelby: Third, vessels will cycle through names and country flags to avoid detection. Out at sea, some crews even use paint to change the vessel's name. The White Crane became Rane, for example. These ships register in countries with looser maritime laws, or they fly false flags and have no registration at all.

So the equivalent of putting false plates on your car. But the problem with falsely flagged vessels, and there are literally hundreds of them now, is that they're flagless, they're lawless, and they're stateless. And that makes them vulnerable under the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Seas to interdiction and seizure by national authorities because they can be boarded.

Shelby: All of these tactics had helped Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro evade US sanctions and keep oil revenue flowing.

In 2025, Venezuela exported roughly 800,000 barrels per day, and about 75% of that oil was done on sanctioned tonnage. And most of that sanctioned tonnage was deploying deceptive shipping practices.

Now, the US is cracking down and it has seized several ships engaged in deceptive practices. The Skipper is one of those sanctioned ships. The 20-year-old tanker spoofed her location, showing she was offshore Guyana around October 28th. In reality, she sailed into Venezuelan waters, where she loaded up at the Jose Terminal. On December 4th, she left with about 1.8 million barrels of crude oil. Two days later, she offloaded a portion of that oil to another ship offshore Curacao. But before she got much further, the Skipper had visitors. A team of US forces rappelled onto the ship, eventually redirecting the Skipper to US waters.

The interdiction of the Skipper gave, you know, the owners and controllers of many dark fleet vessels pause for thought. And so that's when we started seeing vessels sailing to Venezuela, you know, in a holding pattern for a couple of days, and then eventually they turned around.

Since then, the US has interdicted several more tankers as it enforces a defacto blockade of Venezuelan oil, even after capturing Maduro. In response, some dark fleet vessels have raced to evade capture. The Bella 1 is just one example. As the Coast Guard chased her through the North Atlantic, the Bella 1 changed names to the Marinera and registered in Russia. The crew even painted Marinera in Cyrillic on the side of the ship, along with Sochi, the name of its new Russian port. Still, US forces seized the vessel on January 7th.

It was a fake Russian oil tanker. They basically tried to pretend to be a Russian oil tanker in an effort to avoid the sanctions regime.

Analysts say that in the face of the US campaign, a number of ships are trying to seek protection under the Russian flag.

That trend accelerated so rapidly that we've seen 20 vessels reflag in, you know, since early December through to, you know, early January. And they're not just in Venezuelan waters, they're also going through the English Channel, through to the Baltic, to load crude and refined products for Russia. And so this, I think, is part of Russia trying to reclaim these vessels. Remember, the dark fleet is kind of like a lifeline for its energy quantities revenue. So they need to guarantee the safety and security of those ships.

Shelby: Now, there are no dark fleet tankers loading up on Venezuelan oil to ship to other markets, according to shipping analytics firm Kpler. President Trump has said the US will control Venezuelan oil exports indefinitely, and in cooperation with Venezuela's state-run oil company.

We've taken 50 million barrels of oil out of Venezuela in the first four days. We've got millions of barrels of oil left. We're selling it on the open market.

If and when sanctions are rolled back, millions of barrels of oil will be shipped on law-abiding tankers to refineries in the US. And analysts say it will mean the end of the dark fleet in Venezuela.

We haven't seen a dark fleet vessel arrive in Venezuela in weeks. It's quite likely that we won't see another dark fleet tanker load there. And when there's no more business for them, or they just get too old, too expensive to maintain, the beneficial owners just abandon the vessels and their crew.

Shelby: While the dark fleet may be out of opportunities in Venezuela, it could still operate globally to move Iranian and Russian oil. But some analysts say the Trump administration has created a playbook that other countries can adopt.

I think the tolerance for the dark fleet is particularly low now. So there could be a lot of changes in early 2026 about how western governments wanna deal with it.

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