On 17 April 2026, The National published the most operationally detailed account yet of what is actually happening on the water in the Strait of Hormuz. The picture it paints is not a clean blockade. It is a chaotic, technologically contested zone in which hundreds of vessels are lying about where they are, where they are going, and whether they exist at all.<\/p>\n
The industry now has a shorthand for it: the double blockade<\/strong>. Iran is blockading the strait. The United States is blockading Iranian ports. Neither blockade is complete. Both create massive incentives for deception. The result is the largest single concentration of AIS anomalies, GNSS spoofing, and dark-vessel activity in modern maritime history.<\/p>\n There are two distinct technological contests playing out simultaneously:<\/p>\n State actors (military or state-affiliated operators) transmit counterfeit GPS-like signals to deceive the onboard navigation systems of passing vessels. A ship receiving a spoofed signal does not know where it is. Its chart plotter, autopilot, and ECDIS may all display false positions. The practice is standard in conflict zones and has been documented in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the northern Persian Gulf since 2019. In the Strait of Hormuz, multiple vessels have reported simultaneous GNSS anomalies consistent with area-denial jamming.<\/p>\n Vessel operators themselves transmit false Automatic Identification System data — fake coordinates, wrong IMO numbers, duplicate transmissions — to hide real movements from trackers, insurers, and navies. This is a deliberate operator choice, not an external attack. It is also illegal under SOLAS regulations but effectively unenforceable in the current environment.<\/p>\n The difference matters. GNSS spoofing is done to<\/em> vessels. AIS spoofing is done by<\/em> vessels. Both are now endemic in and around the strait.<\/p>\n LSEG ship-tracking records from this week, summarised in The National’s reporting, show a pattern of named vessel behaviour that tells its own story:<\/p>\n Across the broader fleet, “hundreds of vessels” are showing AIS anomalies during recent weeks. Against a pre-war baseline of 100 to 130 daily transits, actual traffic has collapsed to roughly a dozen per day. The gap between the nominal capacity of the strait and its effective capacity is now almost two orders of magnitude.<\/p>\n Each individual vessel’s behaviour is rational given its situation. An Iranian-flagged tanker with Chinese buyers cannot pay a US-administered fee. A Chinese-owned sanctioned tanker cannot remit tolls to Tehran without US secondary-sanction exposure. A Greek-flagged bulk carrier cannot obtain war-risk cover at any price unless it can document the route, which forces it to broadcast AIS, which makes it a CENTCOM interdiction target. A shipowner facing all three constraints simultaneously has no lawful, insurable, and commercially viable path through the strait.<\/p>\n The consequence is deception. Vessels go dark. Identities are spoofed. Routes are hidden. Destinations are false. This is not moral failure. It is the predictable behaviour of commercial actors operating under mutually exclusive legal regimes with no neutral enforcement authority.<\/p>\n The shipping industry has seen this movie before. During the Tanker War of the 1980s, vessels routinely used false flags, dark-AIS practices (then called signal discipline), and evasive routing through Iranian and Iraqi waters. The 1988 Vincennes incident, in which a US cruiser shot down Iran Air Flight 655 after misidentifying it amid chaotic chokepoint traffic, is a direct consequence of the same kind of ungoverned environment that is reappearing in 2026. The institutional lesson then was the same as now: when there is no neutral chokepoint authority, the decision calculus collapses into combat-adjacent judgments that produce catastrophic errors.<\/p>\n Every single deceptive practice documented this week would be structurally eliminated by a neutral, multilateral toll authority. The mechanism is not about enforcement; it is about removing the incentive:<\/p>\n Consider the total institutional cost of the current ungoverned state. Tracking firms and government agencies are spending an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars per week analysing AIS anomalies, satellite imagery, and RF intelligence. P&I clubs have effectively exited the strait. War-risk premiums, where available, are running at one per cent of hull value per transit (from a pre-war baseline of 0.15 per cent). Cargo owners are holding inventory at elevated levels. Charterers are paying ballast bonuses because no one wants to commit to Hormuz-routed voyages.<\/p>\n Compare this with the cost of a functioning toll authority. Based on the rates in our published schedule<\/a>, toll revenue at pre-war transit volumes would generate approximately $15 to $25 billion per year. Of that, roughly $5 to $8 billion would fund the operational components (pilotage, VTS, escort, emergency response). The remainder would flow to environmental programs, infrastructure maintenance, and audited administrative functions. The total cost to the shipping industry would be a small fraction of what the current crisis is costing it per week.<\/p>\n This is the economic case for chokepoint governance, laid out in real time by the behaviour of named vessels visible on LSEG screens. The Rich Starry, the Christianna, the Elpis, the Hong Lu, the G Summer, the Kashan — every one of them would rather be paying a published toll than executing the evasive manoeuvres currently documented in the tracking data.<\/p>\n The Paris summit happening the same day as this reporting is an attempt to build the institutional framework that would end all of it. The calculator<\/a>, rate schedule<\/a>, and Suez and Panama comparison<\/a> on this site are the operational blueprint that framework could adopt.<\/p>\n Sources: The National, “Spoofing and double blockade: What is happening at Strait of Hormuz?” (17 April 2026); LSEG ship-tracking data referenced therein. CENTCOM statements reported by CNBC and Al Jazeera. Tanker War historical context from Polmar, The Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kashan, Rayan, Daisy, Golbon, Rich Starry, Christianna, Elpis, Hong Lu, G Summer: named vessels visible in LSEG tracking data tell a story of a chokepoint where every commercial actor is lying about its position because no neutral authority exists to give them a lawful alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,37,44],"tags":[5,61,6,66,63,62,64,65,30,4],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","category-market-impact","category-security","tag-2026-crisis","tag-ais-spoofing","tag-chokepoint-governance","tag-dark-fleet","tag-double-blockade","tag-gnss-spoofing","tag-kashan","tag-lseg","tag-rich-starry","tag-strait-of-hormuz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hormuztoll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Two kinds of spoofing, one failing chokepoint<\/h2>\n
GNSS spoofing<\/h3>\n
AIS spoofing<\/h3>\n
What the transponder data actually shows<\/h2>\n
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Why this pattern is the inevitable output of ungoverned chokepoints<\/h2>\n
What a functioning toll authority would eliminate<\/h2>\n
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The arithmetic of deception<\/h2>\n