On Good Friday, an aging supertanker fully laden with oil and calling itself Varada arrived in the waters to the east of Malaysia after a two-month voyage from Venezuela.
The vessel raised some red flags: it was 32 years old, past the age at which it would normally have been scrapped, and it was sailing under the flag of Comoros, a popular flag of convenience that makes ships harder to monitor.
For all intents and purposes, though, it seemed like any other so-called dark fleet tanker that carries barrels of sometimes sanctioned oil from producers like Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Except it wasn’t.
The real Varada, which wasn’t sanctioned, had actually been demolished in Bangladesh in 2017. This vessel was what’s known as a zombie or phantom ship, which take on the identities of scrapped tankers to appear legitimate and avoid scrutiny from authorities in the US and elsewhere.
At least four zombie vessels have emerged in recent weeks in the sensitive Venezuelan oil trade, which has become even more risky since the Trump administration imposed tariffs on countries importing oil from the South American nation.
Bloomberg News has used ship-tracking data provided by Starboard Maritime Intelligence and analyzed satellite imagery of the waters off the José and Amuay oil export terminals in Venezuela to identify the four vessels.
The images were compared against historical photos of the four ships whose names and unique International Maritime Organization numbers they have usurped. In each case there were major discrepancies between the zombie ships and their scrapped namesakes, including deck shapes, layouts and colors. The four demolished vessels hadn’t been sanctioned by any government.
The use of zombie tankers allows dark fleet operators to circumvent restrictions on transporting oil. Bloomberg first reported on a zombie ship that showed up at a Chinese port last September, and in November detailed the return of a supposedly scrapped dark-fleet tanker. The ruse is gaining attention within the maritime community, which has long tracked the emergence of a parallel system, including operators, insurers, traders and banks, that supports the dark fleet.
