The Real Cost of False Positives in Maritime Screening

• False positives drive up costs, delay onboarding, and disrupt customer relationships.
• False negatives are even more dangerous, exposing companies to fines, reputational damage, and security threats.
• Most vessels are compliant. The inability to identify the small number of non-compliant actors wastes time and money.
• Sophisticated evaders are no longer hiding. They blend in with normal traffic and operate under a facade of routine activity.

With shrinking financial margins, traders and shippers cannot afford false positives, where vessels that are actually safe and compliant are mistakenly flagged. Yet, the raw AIS data that underpins maritime sanctions screening has always been noisy and volatile, producing alerts that too often lead nowhere.

These inaccurate signals drive unnecessary investigations, drain resources, and ultimately force companies to miss out on legitimate business. That means handing a competitive advantage to those with smarter screening tools.

Geopolitical disruptions, such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, escalating sanctions, and the growth of the shadow fleet, have made it more difficult than ever to separate real risk from routine behavior. In this climate of heightened sensitivity, traders, shippers, and bunkering firms without real-time AI insights often take an overly cautious approach. The result is more false positives, more missed opportunities, and more time spent investigating non-issues.

The deceptive shipping practices (DSP) landscape is constantly evolving. Sophisticated actors are moving beyond simple AIS disabling and are now using tactics like GNSS spoofing to manipulate location data. These tactics can fool outdated systems into approving vessels that should not pass screening. This creates false negatives and allows high-risk actors to operate undetected.

This is not just a compliance problem. It is an operational one.

Taken together, these behaviors indicate a deliberate pattern of movement and coordination across multiple vessels, elevating the risk classification of the entire fleet.

Trading companies cannot afford to issue blanket bans or chase every alert. But relying on raw AIS data floods teams with a volume of red flags that is impossible to manage manually. Sorting through this noise requires large compliance teams, which is costly and inefficient.

AIS gaps are only one of many issues. Compliance teams must also interpret:

• Close proximity between vessels that may look like transshipments 
• Changes in vessel flags that obscure historical data 
• Corrupt GPS coordinates that create false location signals
• Cases where vessel identities and locations are deliberately manipulated 

Each situation adds complexity and increases the burden on screening teams.

What About False Negatives?

These are the risks that slip through undetected. When illicit vessels appear compliant, the results can be severe. Missed red flags can lead to significant fines, reputational fallout, and overlooked security threats.

Tactics have evolved. Going dark is still used, but increasingly, high-value vessels remain visible to avoid scrutiny. These actors try to look clean while continuing illicit activities.

They are not disappearing. They are blending in.

Look Beyond the Blips

Traditional screening methods often struggle to keep up with the complexity of today’s maritime risk landscape. Organizations face a flood of data—yet remain in the dark about intent. The challenge isn’t access to information, it’s turning that information into insight.

To uncover true risk, companies need to move beyond generic vessel data. The key lies in contextual reasoning: understanding not just what happened, but why. This means fusing behavioral analytics, ownership structures, trading patterns, and environmental context to see the full picture.

The industry’s best practice? Adopt technology that can automate and scale this kind of high-context analysis. It’s not just about reducing false positives—it’s about making smarter, faster decisions that actually reflect the operational realities at sea.

Sanctions evasion. AIS spoofing. GPS jamming. Each of these tactics adds a new layer of complexity for organizations trying to ensure compliance and manage risk. But more data isn’t the answer. The real challenge is cutting through the noise.

Best-in-class risk teams are no longer relying solely on rule-based triggers. They’re adopting advanced tools that bring context to every case. Tools that fuse behavioral signals, geopolitical data, and proprietary indicators to distinguish suspicious activity from operational anomalies.

The goal isn’t perfect detection. It’s about having enough clarity to confidently prioritize threats and focus human attention where it matters most.

The Windward Executive Brief series gives maritime leaders practical insights to enhance compliance, risk management, and operational resilience.

Windward is the leading Maritime AI™ company. Our platform empowers stakeholders across trade, shipping, and government with predictive, real-time intelligence. Enhanced by Generative AI, Windward helps organizations navigate complexity and make smarter, faster decisions.