This whitepaper reveals how sanctions, shadow fleets, and deceptive shipping behaviours reshaped maritime risk in 2025 — and how predictive compliance signals can help risk and compliance teams anticipate exposure before enforcement escalates in 2026.

In 2025, maritime compliance crossed a critical threshold: shadow fleets scaled, deceptive behaviours became systemic, and risk increasingly migrated across routes and networks rather than disappearing, raising the bar for compliance going into 2026.
This analysis of more than 3,300 vessels shows that sanction designations consistently follow detectable behavioural signals well before enforcement, proving compliance risk can be anticipated, not just identified.

