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Planet Labs, Copernicus Sentinel-2, Maxar Technologies, ESRI, GEBCO, Spire Global, MarineTraffic
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The Cathay Phoenix is not a lone rogue ship, but one of at least three tankers identified by The New York Times taking extraordinary steps to hide their true activity, a practice that helps them to elude U.S. government oversight and puts their American insurer at risk of violating recent sanctions on Russian crude oil.
For years, ships wanting to hide their whereabouts have resorted to turning off the transponders all large vessels use to signal their location. But the tankers tracked by The Times go beyond this, using cutting-edge spoofing technology to make it appear they’re in one location when they’re really somewhere else.
During at least 13 voyages, the three tankers pretended to be sailing west of Japan. In reality, they were at terminals in Russia and shipping oil to China.