By Jim Thomas | Friday, 12 December 2025 06:54 PM EST
U.S. forces seized an oil tanker off Venezuela this week after tracking data and satellite imagery indicated the ship was falsifying and concealing its location to evade U.S. sanctions.
The Treasury Department has identified the vessel as part of an illicit oil-shipping network.
Publicly available satellite imagery and ship-tracking data indicate that the tanker named Skipper concealed its location, according to The Washington Times.
The same tracking data suggests the Skipper has carried sanctioned oil from Iran and Venezuela.
Both countries’ oil industries are under U.S. sanctions, and the Skipper has been “punished by the Treasury Department since 2022.”
Treasury sanctions records from November 2022 identify the vessel ADISA, an oil products tanker linked to Triton Navigation Corp., an entity Treasury designated under executive order 13224.
The Treasury release also identified Triton Navigation as a company used to arrange ownership of oil vessels and states that “the ADISA is being identified as property in which Triton Navigation Corp. has an interest.”
In its Nov. 3, 2022, press release announcing the designations, Treasury said the network it targeted used shell companies and fraudulent tactics, including document falsification, to obfuscate the origins of Iranian oil and evade sanctions.
The Washington Times report said that when U.S. forces captured the Skipper on Wednesday, the vessel was allegedly transporting Iranian and Venezuelan oil to Cuba.
It described the ship as a “shadow vessel” that hid its position by sending fake signal locations, a practice known as “spoofing.”
Kpler, a maritime analytics company, estimated the ship obscured its location through spoofing for more than 80 days over the past two years.
The Washington Times report also cited MarineTraffic data indicating the ship had not declared a location since Nov. 7, more than a month before U.S. Coast Guard and Navy forces captured it.
Data suggested that the Skipper conducted a ship-to-ship transfer between Aug. 11 and Aug. 13, a maneuver it said was confirmed by satellite imagery. It reported the cargo was unloaded in China, where it was “falsely declared.”
The report described the Skipper’s track as moving between the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean. It said publicly accessible satellite imagery placed the tanker near Venezuela, while some transponder-based tracking placed it near Guyana.
Trump has accused Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro of shipping illicit drugs into the United States, which Maduro denies, and described the seizure as part of Trump’s pressure campaign on Venezuela’s government.
Venezuela has historically used vessels such as the Skipper to mitigate the impact of oil sanctions imposed by Trump.
Subsequently, Venezuela has resorted to deploying dark, or shadow, fleets. These ships, which reportedly account for up to 20% of the global oil tanker fleet, frequently obscure their destinations by altering data records.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.
