The phenomenon of false flag represents a critical challenge to maritime safety, security and compliance with international regulations. Vessels potentially operating under fraudulent or misusing flag registrations exploit legal and administrative gaps to evade oversight and accountability.
A false flag designation is applied to ships that misuse flag details without legal authorisation from the flag state. This practice undermines the integrity of maritime governance, potentially enabling illicit activities such as sanctions evasion, ship-to-ship transfers of cargo subject to sanctions and environmental violations.
Over time, the prevalence and tactics of false-flag vessels have evolved significantly. Data from S&P Global highlights a staggering increase in false-flag vessels between 2022 and 2025, driven by large-scale purges from reputable registries and heightened enforcement of sanctions programmes. This temporal shift reveals emerging patterns in evasion strategies, including frequent flag hopping, manipulation of Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, falsified documentation, and complex ownership structures. Additionally, the rise in smaller or open registries being exploited further complicates efforts to combat fraudulent practices.
Such subterfuge can present itself in a variety of ways, including:
- False digital identity: Manipulating AIS data in such a way that it misrepresents the identity of the vessel. This can include transmitting the identity or identifiers associated to another vessel, or the fabrication of digital identifiers associated to a flag (the Maritime Identifying Digits [MID] & call sign).
- Terminated registry: Where following termination/expiration, a vessel previously registered under a flag state continues to make use of their previously registered details, be it digitally, physically, or through documentation.
- Fraudulent registration: The use/submission of false documentation associated to a flag state to seek further documentation/registration.
A vessel might associate itself to a particular flag physically, digitally or through documentation. However, doing so without authorisation from the flag could be construed as committing fraud.
In some cases, vessels will emulate such identifiers as a front to dissociate themselves from their actual identity. In other cases where this is not the case, this could also imply that the vessel is not registered under a flag at all.
The flag state plays a critical role in shipping, and acts as the primary authority that oversees and regulates all aspects of commercial, operational, safety, legal activities of merchant ships for the vessels registered under their flag.
Most of the tonnage for cargo vessels are primarily associated to Liberia, Panama, Marshall Islands, Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore (which between them account for 58% of the cargo tonnage).
