Special Halloween: Zombie ships are real
Automatically generated translation; may contain errors.
October 2021. A ship arrives at a scrapyard in Gadani, Pakistan.
In March 2025, more than three years later, its identity appears again in maritime tracking data, near Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
The same IMO number.
So, what came back?
Maritime intelligence company Windward documented the episode as a case of another vessel assuming the identity of a ship taken out of service.
A “zombie vessel.”
At sea, ships broadcast identification and position information through AIS, the Automatic Identification System. But the identifiers transmitted can be false.
A vessel broadcasting another ship’s IMO number does not acquire that ship’s legitimate identity. It creates a misleading trail in the data.
Detecting the deception requires more than following a moving dot. Analysts compare tracking history, vessel records and imagery. A suspicious signal alone does not prove fraud: data errors and incorrect identity associations can also occur.
This Halloween, our illustrated story explores a real form of maritime identity theft.
The characters and stormy encounter are fictional. The practice is documented.
The ship on your screen may not be the ship at sea.
This article was produced by Westhon Media for One Energy News.