Four Tankers "in Lima": The Position Everyone Throws Away Is the Evidence

Last Sunday night, a receiver in Varna, Bulgaria picked up 27 position reports from four tankers in the Black Sea. Every one of them placed the ships on the same one-kilometre circle in central Lima, Peru, more than 12,000 km away. The alert came from Worldwide AIS Network, a startup based in Copenhagen.

Why this is certain, in plain words. AIS travels by VHF radio, and VHF only reaches a limited distance. A receiver in Varna can only hear ships near Varna. So when it hears a ship saying it is in Peru, the message is physically impossible, whatever position is written inside it. Nobody has to guess who is lying. The physics settles it.

Bigger than one night. Between 2 and 9 September the company counted 1,702 impossible position jumps from 379 vessels in the Gulf of Oman. At midnight on 9 September, almost one third of position reports from that area arrived with the ship's positioning system marked as not working. It has also seen interference in the Baltic.

The point that made us run this story. Most AIS data services clean their data. Positions that are obviously wrong are removed later as outliers, because they spoil maps and analytics. The company's argument is that this cleaning throws away the proof that a ship's satellite navigation was jammed or spoofed. The "error" is the record of the attack.

Honest limits. All the numbers are the company's own. The ships are not named, and no customer is named. The company says it is building its receiver network for insurers, maritime authorities and defence customers. Its chief executive says rivals analyse interference after the event while his company catches it live. That is a sales claim until somebody tests it.

What to ask on Monday. Voyage optimisation, arrival-time prediction, sanctions screening and emissions checks all use AIS data. Ask your AIS or voyage-data provider one question: do you delete impossible positions, or do you flag them and keep them? If they delete them, the record of a spoofing event around your ship may be gone before you know you need it. [Splash247]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 27 September 2026.