Christiaan Triebert

They're very big and, you know, if they don't send out a location signal and another ship doesn't see them in low visibility, for instance, it's going to be a disaster.

So...

There's an agreement.

All the bit large ships should send out this transponder signal.

But the transponder signal also allows anyone on the planet to kind of see where these ships are.

There's a website called Marine Traffic.

And, you know, you can see thousands of vessels that you can just track in real time.

But from all those 16 ships that disappeared from Venezuelan waters, we couldn't track any of them.

Why?

Because they either switched off their transponder signal

which means going dark, or they faked their location signal to pretend they're actually off the coast of West Africa or Asia, a method that's known as spoofing.

They're spoofing their location signal.

Right.

So we basically just look at satellite imagery.

It shows the coast, it shows the water, and it shows ships in the sea.

And I can see there is a tanker with a red deck.

There is a larger tanker with a green deck.

And we're trying to identify which tankers they are.

So every arrow is a ship that's sending out a location signal.

Green means it's carrying cargo.