Initial prompt:

Let’s assume I am the new sanctions officer at a company with exposure to maritime shipping – but that I have never had experience in this field. Tell me, as a non-expert professional, what the things I have to look out for (e.g. AIS manipulation, falsified documents), how in general each is addressed, and which public and commercial data, services and technical solutions can help address each, to what extent and how well. When you’ve listed all these out, then produce a separate section just to lay out, by type of solution (e.g. data, software, services), all the items listed in the previous section, with a synopsis of what they can do, and how well they do it – plus, of course, who provides them, and their URL.

and the initial response:

and one of the more important follow-up prompts (besides the ones to fix formatting):

Some of these solutions sound interesting, but I have no idea how one would use them. Please, for each solution in sections C, D, G and H provide 1 or 2 use cases for how one would use these tools – explain the situation, the problem, and what the tool can do, and the timeframe (real-time, post-mortem, etc.)

and the specific response to this:

Section C: Integrated maritime risk and compliance platforms

Windward

Your chartering desk is about to fix a tanker for a cargo lift and needs to clear the vessel before signing. A plain sanctions-list check would come back clean, since the vessel isn’t formally designated yet, but Windward pulls up its behavioral score anyway: recent AIS gaps in a known STS corridor, an ownership change six weeks ago, a jump in risk rating. It returns a go/escalate/no-go recommendation with the evidence attached, in minutes, so it fits inside the negotiation window rather than delaying it. That’s a real-time, transaction-level check.

The second use is different in kind. Say your trade finance desk has already financed a dozen cargo shipments, and the vessels involved were clean at onboarding. Windward re-screens the existing book continuously and pushes an alert if any of those vessels’ risk scores cross a threshold later, catching drift (a reflag, a new STS pattern) that a one-time check at onboarding would never see. This is ongoing portfolio monitoring, not a point-in-time lookup.

PurpleTRAC (Pole Star Global)

A cargo arrives with a bill of lading claiming a certain origin and goods description. Before your team accepts it, PurpleTRAC’s document-screening module (DUG Screening) checks that description and discharge country against 26 restricted-goods and sanctioned-region lists and returns an OK, Warning, or Critical flag in near-real time, catching the specific falsified-certificate pattern OFAC has called out by name.

Separately, your compliance officer needs to screen the whole existing vessel and counterparty list weekly and produce something a regulator would accept as evidence of due diligence. PurpleTRAC runs that as an automated batch job and stores the reports for retrieval, so it’s a periodic, scheduled process rather than a one-off check, and the output is the audit trail itself, not just the answer.

Seasearcher (Lloyd’s List Intelligence)

A vessel your company chartered went dark for four days, and a news report afterward suggests something happened during that window. This is a post-mortem: your team needs to reconstruct the voyage to decide whether to escalate internally, notify a regulator, or exit the relationship. Seasearcher’s analysts and Lloyd’s Agents rebuild the voyage from multiple independent sources and produce a timeline flagging any STS activity or dark port calls, typically over hours to a few days, since it involves human review, not an instant automated answer.

The other common use is upfront, not retrospective: a new ship owner approaches your company as a potential long-term counterparty, and you need a first-pass due diligence pull before the relationship starts. Seasearcher returns ownership up to seven levels deep, sanctions status, and casualty and detention history in one same-day report.

Sea-web / Maritime Intelligence Risk Suite (S&P Global)

An insurer is pricing a hull policy and needs accurate technical specifications and ownership history to confirm the vessel hasn’t passed through a sanctioned owner’s hands at some point. Sea-web is the reference-grade source for that: over 600 data fields per vessel, with historical name, owner, and flag changes going back through the vessel’s life. This is a static, on-demand reference lookup rather than a monitoring function, essentially instant retrieval used as one input into a pricing decision that itself takes longer.

Section D: Commodity flow, cargo, and freight intelligence

Kpler (including MarineTraffic and FleetMon)

A trading desk is offered a cargo that changed hands via an open-ocean STS transfer and has only the seller’s word for what it actually is. Kpler correlates both vessels’ AIS tracks, models the transfer, and estimates the cargo grade and volume that moved, cross-checked against its own shadow-fleet list. That’s a same-day, pre-purchase check, not instantaneous, since reconstructing a specific past event takes some processing.

The second use sits at a different altitude entirely. Your risk function wants to know whether shadow-fleet activity is rising in a corridor the company operates in, as a signal to tighten internal thresholds before a specific transaction forces the question. Kpler publishes aggregate flow and dark-fleet trend data monthly, which is a strategic, periodic input into policy review rather than a transaction-level tool.

Vortexa

You’re buying a cargo of Russian-origin refined product, and the seller attests the price was under the G7 cap. Price-cap compliance runs on attestation, not physical verification, so you need a same-day sanity check: Vortexa’s grade-level market pricing and freight data let you confirm the attested price is plausible against what the market was actually doing that week.

Separately, a vessel presented to your chartering team looks slightly off, unusually capable specs for its claimed age. Vortexa’s cargo and fleet-movement history can surface the kind of inconsistency that points to a “zombie tanker,” a scrapped hull’s identity reused to move cargo under a clean-looking name, before your team commits to the charter.

Section G: Independent vessel geolocation and remote sensing

Spire Maritime

Vessels you charter transit open ocean where terrestrial AIS coverage is thin, and a legitimate coverage gap looks identical to deliberate manipulation from the outside. Spire’s satellite AIS network fills that gap with near-real-time position data (some latency versus terrestrial AIS, but still operationally current), so your team isn’t flagging a routine dead zone as evasion.

The other case is investigative: a chartered vessel’s AIS went fully silent for four days in a high-risk corridor, and you need an independent read on where it actually was. Spire’s RF-monitoring satellites can pick up other emissions from the vessel (radar, VHF) during that window and estimate its position. This is retrospective, typically turned around over a few days once tasked, not instant.

HawkEye 360

An AIS gap lines up with just enough time for a vessel to have reached a sanctioned port, and your compliance team needs to know whether it actually went there before deciding how to respond. HawkEye 360 geolocates the vessel’s other radio emissions during that specific gap window to answer that question. This is a tasked, retrospective investigation, resolved over days as its satellites pass over the area, and it’s exactly this capability that let it publicly trace an AIS-dark cargo vessel to a Syrian port in a documented 2021 case.

A second, broader use: before investing in or servicing a port in a region known for shadow-fleet activity, you want an independent read on how much dark-vessel traffic actually passes through, not just what’s officially reported. A regional RF sweep over some days to weeks establishes that baseline as part of the due diligence, rather than confirming any one vessel.

ICEYE

Two vessels’ last known positions before going dark suggest they may have met at sea. If that inference matters (say, to a decision about exiting a counterparty relationship or filing a report), you want visual confirmation, not just inference. ICEYE tasks a synthetic aperture radar satellite over the suspected location; because SAR sees through cloud and darkness, it can catch two vessels alongside each other regardless of weather. This is a tasked, investigative pull, typically same-day to a few days depending on the satellite’s revisit schedule.

A related but different use is pattern-of-life: you suspect a vessel is repeatedly loitering at a known STS anchorage rather than making a one-off legitimate stop. Repeated ICEYE passes over the same location, spread across days to weeks, build the time series that turns a single suspicious sighting into an established pattern.

BlackSky

RF or SAR has narrowed a dark vessel down to a location but can’t put a name to it. BlackSky tasks a high-resolution optical satellite for a close look, which the company markets as arriving within roughly 90 minutes of a request, the fastest of the imagery layers, though still dependent on daylight and clear skies since it’s optical rather than radar. This is the confirmation step that typically follows an RF or SAR detection, not a first-detection tool on its own.

The second use is more of a standing watch: an independent read on vessel traffic and congestion at a specific high-risk port over time, since official port-call records for some ports are incomplete or simply not published. Repeated imaging over days to weeks builds that picture.

Section H: Open-source and NGO investigative trackers

Russian Shadow Fleet Tracker (KSE Institute)

Your compliance team is deciding how aggressive to set internal shadow-fleet criteria (an age cutoff, how much scrutiny a non-IG insurer gets) and wants an independent benchmark rather than relying entirely on a vendor’s undisclosed methodology. KSE’s monthly, methodologically transparent tracker gives current data on typical shadow-fleet vessel age, ownership jurisdictions, and insurance patterns to calibrate against. This is periodic and strategic, used to set or revisit policy, not to clear an individual transaction.

The more everyday use is a quick, free sanity check: a vessel name comes up in a proposed charter, and before paying for a full commercial screening pull, someone runs the name against KSE’s public reporting to see if it’s already been flagged. On-demand, free, and fast, but a supplement to paid screening rather than a replacement for it.

UANI Tanker Tracker

A vessel in a proposed transaction has some connection to routes UANI covers, and you want an independent cross-reference specifically on the Iran side, where UANI’s tracking is particularly well regarded. Its public reporting, refreshed roughly monthly and built on AIS analysis, satellite imagery, and its MINERVA behavioral system, gives a same-day reference check against a regularly updated public record.

The other use is upward, not transactional: leadership wants a periodic, plain-English update on how Iranian oil sanctions evasion is trending, to inform a strategic decision about the company’s exposure in the region, not the compliance-officer-level detail a vendor platform provides. UANI’s monthly tracker functions as that briefing input.

eventually, we rolled this section into an appendix – here’s the final guide:

Now, I literally have not worked in this part of the field – but probably 3/4 of the webinars I attend deal with maritime shipping issues. I welcome comments on this, since I am really in the dark here.