Christiaan Triebert

So when you leave altogether in a group of 16, the odds that you're going to get caught are way smaller than when it's just one vessel leaving or two vessels leaving.

Because the United States has a huge military force build up around Venezuela.

But we saw that, you know, over the holidays for three weeks, they chase one tanker.

Imagine having to chase 16 of them.

So the odds for these tankers leaving in a coordinated effort, the odds of being captured by the United States are way smaller.

Strength in numbers.

Strength in numbers, indeed.

Which is very striking that you can imagine that, oh, Maduro is being captured and all these ships are basically deciding amongst themselves, are we going to go make a run for it or not?

And it seems a group of 16 indeed did.

So me and my colleagues were thinking, what's going on?

Where have these tankers gone and will they be able to outrun the Americans?

Which would be wild, right?

Because this is arguably the most powerful military in the world.

And are they continuing to evade these sanctions on them or will they eventually get caught?

So we set out and tried to find out.

Yeah, so these ships engage in a lot of deceptive practices.

And because they use these deceptive techniques, it's pretty hard.

But if you know where to look, you can get some pretty good clues.

Well, how do you even know where to look?

So, for example, every oil tanker needs to send out a location signal, which is for safety.