"Tracking Suspicious Ships" with Christian Panton

This week we spoke to maritime researcher Christian Panton. Christian builds resources to monitor ships as a hobby and has created a useful database of 'sketchy boats' that require further investigation. In the talk he described the purpose of the tool and how he created it, and provided a detailed overview of the current issues with researching ships up to no good.

The talk was hosted by Charlotte Maher on Thursday September 25th 2025. Music featured is courtesy of Artlist.

Recorded live in the Bellingcat Discord Server: https://discord.com/invite/bellingcat

Links discussed:

Sketchy Boats website: https://sketchy.boats/

Sketchy Boats GitHub: https://github.com/christianpanton/those.sketchy.boats

Christian's pages: https://bsky.app/profile/pa.nton.cx

https://christian.panton.org/

Lloyds list investigation on false flags that Christian contributed to: https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1154326/Massive-fraudulent-flag-operation-linking-over-20-separate-fake-sites-uncovered

Bellingcat investigation into the ships smuggling grain from occupied Crimea: https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1154326/Massive-fraudulent-flag-operation-linking-over-20-separate-fake-sites-uncovered

Bellingcat's Ship Detection Tool (built with Ollie Ballinger): https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2023/05/11/peering-beyond-the-clouds-a-guide-to-bellingcats-ship-detection-tool/

And Ollie's GitHub page: https://oballinger.github.io/

#maritime channel in Discord: https://discord.com/channels/709752884257882135/920298016123023400