Source: WIRED
Spoofed vessel identities are becoming standard practice in the Strait of Hormuz, forcing insurers and traders to build parallel tracking infrastructure because official maritime monitoring systems no longer reliably track the 21% of global oil transiting this corridor. The breakdown creates information asymmetries where traders with access to private satellite and AIS data gain structural advantages, while geopolitical actors—Iranian sellers, sanctioned buyers—exploit the opacity to move oil off official ledgers. When the infrastructure designed to make global commodity flows transparent becomes unreliable, the market fragments into tiers of visibility. Risk and opportunity concentrate in those gaps.