Christiaan Triebert

Thank you.

That's a very good question.

Besides shadow fleet and ghost fleet, there's a third term, which is dark fleet.

So it's interesting because there's not a well-defined definition.

It's basically a term for oil tankers that use deceptive practices to kind of hide that they're transporting sanctioned oil.

oil that's sanctioned by the United States, and these ships want to hide that they're picking up this oil and delivering this oil.

Why do I know a lot about it?

It's because that after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, there was this same sudden surge in interest, like Ghost Fleet, Dark Fleet, Shadow Fleet.

And my manager asked me, like, Chris, can you find out

What are actually the ships of this fleet?

So that's how it started for me.

But there are hundreds of tankers, maybe even thousands.

We don't really know.

And basically, these tankers are shipping sanctioned Russian oil or sanctioned Iranian oil and Venezuelan oil.

They're always shipping oil for either of these three countries and sometimes for all three.

Most of the oil goes to China and a significant portion goes to India as well.

And these ships have decided to do that.

There's a lot of money to make if you're shipping sanctioned oil.

And they're trying to hide that.

It's hard to say, right, because they're obviously trying to deceive everyone that they're actually shipping this oil.