Draft:Zombie ship
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A zombie ship, also known as a zombie vessel, is a ship using the identity of a scrapped vessel, usually to circumvent legal restrictions or bypass international sanctions through the manipulation of Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals.
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This is done by reusing the same IMO or MMSI numbers and flags of a scrapped vessel a zombie ship is masquerading as.[1][2] The practice of using zombie ships in shadow fleets has increased since the late 2010s, mainly in relation to Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and China, transporting sanctioned oil and illicit ship-to-ship (STS) transfers.[3][2][4][5] The United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) banned the practice in 2025.[5]
Some sanctioned vessels have also been known to hijack the live identity of operational ships, while others completely invent fake IMO numbers.[4]
The term "zombie ship" was used infrequently until being popularised by the maritime AI company, Windward,[6][7] and has since been used commonly by the media to identify certain vessels of the Russian shadow fleet since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the tanker Gale broadcasting as the Beeta in the English Channel,[7] and two ships that traversed the Strait of Hormuz during the 2026 Iran war identifying as the LNG Jamal, which was sold for scrap the year prior, and the Baltic Highway, which was scrapped in 2020.[8]
Other examples include the Apus masquerading as the Freesia I to transport heavy fuel oil, and two ships falsely identifying themselves as the Uranus, which had been confirmed as having been scrapped and the Varada.[3] And the EM Longevity, which was scrapped in 2021 before its AIS signals began being broadcast again in 2023, as of 2025 the ship pretending to be the EM Longevity remains active, supplying Chinese refineries.[3][9]