ALARMING growth extrapolations are routinely nonsense.

The famous example posits that if the growth of Elvis impersonators continued at the rate it had done since 1977, by 2043, all humans on earth would be Elvis impersonators.

Given the rapid multiplication of fraudulent ship registers from almost nothing two years ago to more than 50 countries having fake flags attributed to them today, we could similarly calculate the whole of the International Maritime Organization will be fraudulent by 2030.

You can insert your own cheap gag about regulatory impotence here, but the numbers should nonetheless alarm everybody — and the implications of all of this are decidedly unfunny.

As the list of sanctioned tankers grow by the week, so too does the corresponding list of sham ship registries cropping up globally to offer a temporary façade of legitimacy to illicit oil trades.

The few regulatory officials genuinely trying to shut these operations down had long-held suspicions that these flags were being created by the same people. That appears to be the case.

Our investigation into hundreds of fake documents, linking dozens of entirely fictional websites, proves that many of these operations can be traced back to a handful of distinct groups of scammers.

Understanding how they are doing this, though, is only half the battle. Shutting them down is proving to be a problem that few seem willing to tackle.

In the course of this investigation, we spoke to everyone from former fraud investigators to Interpol, and nobody had a silver-bullet solution to slow down the pace of fake flag hopping.

In the time it took us to investigate all this, Eswatini had turned into Mali and several of the websites we were investigating were removed, only to reappear elsewhere. Several new ones emerged as we were writing the story.

Meanwhile, some sanctioned ships are now clocking up as many as three flag changes in less than two weeks — and the shopping list of fraudulent sites offering safe haven to order is growing by the day.

Whether these fraudulent operations can be shut down is only part of the problem facing governments. Even if they could, theoretically, find a way to deal with the websites, they would only be tackling the symptoms of a much more serious disease that is undermining the rules-based order upon which shipping relies.

Sanctions undermine shipping safety by creating the conditions for the shadow fleet to thrive and have spawned a lucrative market of substandard shipping that thrives amid the cracks of an increasingly fragmented world.

The bottom feeders, the fake flags and fraudulent operators that increasingly are interchangeable with real, but illicit operations, are all part of a much bigger problem.

Click here to view the latest Lloyd’s List Daily Briefing