Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine
31 comments
·September 12, 2025hn_throw_250910
I like the Tom Clancy vibes of this. There’s a Sum of All Fears in there somewhere.
On a more serious note this reminds me of the crime occurring in Canada. They have a car theft pipeline in place with paperwork at the MOT level. The cars end up being shipped to Africa in less time than you might think - this is one outcome, but there are others. Nobody really “cares” enough even though one of the mayors stated everyone they know in their neighborhood has had their car stolen.
The war was already lost, at home and abroad.
stronglikedan
Canada also recommended to leave residential doors unlocked with the car keys in plain sight to reduce the chances of property damage and personal harm when the thieves come for your car, so Canada can get stuffed.
Taek
Are you able to unpack that more? Are people not proud of themselves and their culture? Do they not want to prioritize the safety of themselves and their possessions?
p0wn
Thieves are good for the economy. They force consumers to consume more.
truffet
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koakuma-chan
Just use public transit, it's good for environment
smithkl42
This is a classic example of Poe's Law. If it's satire, it's brilliant. If it's serious, well ...
jimnotgym
This is how we will lose this war. 'Everyone knows it is fake', probably the authorities too. But dealing with it in modern bureaucracy will take years, by which time another fake insurer is up and running.
throw83939449
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renewiltord
It’s important to follow due process. We need more checks and balances, not fewer. Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
We need to follow the process. And the process should be extensive. This is a problem of not enough process. Ideally, we could have more.
diggan
> Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)
renewiltord
Haha, I was explaining how it should be. Not how it is.
colechristensen
Due process needs to be a lot faster and it could be. Things which warrant immediate action are delayed by months, years, or decades by wildly inefficient and slow processes that have nothing to do with someone's right to fair judgement.
renewiltord
We shouldn’t rush to judgment. A few years sounds like a good period of time for things that could affect someone’s life. One could argue it should take a century or more to convict people of such crimes. How can we be sure it’s not politically motivated? Only way is to ensure that we wait for political change and see if the crime is still to be prosecuted.
andix
It’s crazy how modern and complex company structures became impossible to govern.
There are so many cases in which criminals just open a ton of new companies, to overload the authorities. Until the authorities shut something down, they moved on three times already.
NoahZuniga
That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.
Simulacra
For some context, I strongly encourage you to read "90% of everything" by Rose George. It is a brilliant expose of the shipping industry, and it's a really bad industry. Flags of convenience, forcing people to work on ships, not paying them, not even really caring if they fall overboard. The international shipping industry is damn near a hate crime.
iosua2015
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SanjayMehta
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ceejayoz
The second sentence of the article answers the fake insurance bit; "did not have permission to sell insurance but did it anyway".
If you click the (helpfully underlined) first use of "shadow fleet" in the article it defines it for you. (Or ask Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet)
svota
I feel like TFA answers the fake insurance question pretty well. The company sold "insurance" which was not actually insurance. They were providing a cover for ships selling from a sanctioned country. Those ships were required to have insurance, and no legitimate business would insure them.
jplrssn
> What is “fake insurance?”
Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?
cenamus
You can literally press on it in the article and a definition pops up.
null
newyankee
Anything not validated by NATO/ USA is fake, rest of the world should adhere to their terms and definitions as the high seas are owned by them
polotics
Definitely no. The "fake" here is about certainty that no insurance payout would occur in case of issue, meaning for example an oil tanker accidently dumping tons of black goo onto some english seaside resort, no compensation would come out of anywhere.
vintermann
How reliable is liability insurance for that sort of thing, generally speaking?
throwawaysleep
They were not truly insured.
dmix
I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a financial surveillance state and have to openly treat partner countries/trade with deep suspicion.
Military action is almost preferable to that.
The URL and HTML title element have the current HN title, "Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine." But FWIW, the Open Graph title meta element is "NRK reveals: Russian used Norwegian company to fool the West."