Keeping ships afloat: Maritime fraud affects us all

On July 5, 2011, the tanker ship, Brillante Virtuoso, which was carrying 140,000 metric tons of fuel oil, was drifting within Yemeni waters. Later in the day, a small boat with seven armed men approached the vessel. The men, who claimed to be a “security team” to escort the tanker through the Gulf of Aden from the Arabian Sea, hijacked the ship and demanded that the vessel proceed to Somalia.

Within an hour, the ship’s main engine inexplicably broke down, and the armed men set the vessel on fire and left. A U.S. warship rescued the Brillante Virtuoso. The vessel’s owner later sold it for scrap and filed an insurance claim for US$77 million. However, investigators discovered that the vessel’s owner had staged the hijacking to commit insurance fraud. (See Brillante Virtuoso - an extraordinary attempt at maritime insurance fraud, by Chris Zavos, Jo Ward, Suzy Oakley and Jacob Hooper, Kennedys Law, May 10, 2019.)

Fraud on the seas