Christiaan Triebert

Purple means it's like a pleasure craft, so like a yacht or a cruise ship.

And red are tankers, and that's what we're interested in.

Okay.

And what you can see here is three vessels, right?

I see three red arrows, yep, okay.

But if we look at the satellite image, we can see that there are way more ships there.

Exactly.

So all these ships that send out a legitimate signal, they're usually OK because they have nothing to hide.

They're showing that they're in Venezuela and they're saying that's for anyone to see on the world.

Anyone with an internet connection can see, hey, they're sending out the signal from Venezuela.

But I'm very interested in the ships that appear in the satellite image, but they are not sending out a signal.

So they're not visible on that website.

So then I can try to identify these ships by zooming in on the satellite image, seeing what color the deck is, how long it is, how wide it is.

And then I can check that information against the database of tankers that I've built up over the past few years together with my colleagues that list tankers that are in the shadow fleet by name.

But it's very tricky because they change their names, not only in online registries or shipping registries, but also when you would see the ship in person.

There is a group called tankertrackers.com company that is specialized in this and they have a photographer on shore in Venezuela.

that kind of like secretly takes photos of these tankers.

These photos are usually not published, but we have access to them and we can get an insight on how do these ships actually look like from the ground, right?

Sometimes we try to find out which tankers they are by trying to see if there's any sailors on board, any crew members that are maybe posting a TikTok video or Instagram videos.

About their lives.