Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

136 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by aregue
(nrk.no)

37 Comments

jimnotgym

2 hours ago

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.

potato3732842

5 minutes ago

A big part of the problem here is that ships and trips that don't by the numbers benefit from buying insurance are being forced to so there's a whole ecosystem of various shades of sketchy insurance insuring all sorts of mundane things and so sketchy insurance is a poor heuristic for "they might be up to no good, it's worth looking into them".

There's an artificially oversized haystack the needles are hiding in.

renewiltord

2 hours ago

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

an hour ago

> 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 :)

Y-bar

11 minutes ago

Both Norway and Sweden have Lay Judges in the lower courts (which is little more than voluntary juries):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_judge

diggan

2 minutes ago

Nämndemän (Lay Judges) are nothing like juries, at least how I understand juries. In lower courts (tingsrätt), those people are appointed by the city council, and the people chosen are often politically involved (yet the appointment is "unpolitical"), they're not just "randoms" who got called to be in the jury, like how I understand the juries in the US to work.

renewiltord

an hour ago

Haha, I was explaining how it should be. Not how it is.

colechristensen

an hour ago

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

an hour ago

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.

AdrianB1

44 minutes ago

"Justice delayed is justice denied".

dmix

an hour ago

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 giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market organize crime business.

Military action is appearing more preferable to that.

For example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o

> In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine's allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas.

> Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

> The lion's share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.

Meaning 3 years into the war Europe is still sending more $$ to Russia for gas than they send Ukraine in aid

onpointed

4 minutes ago

Or encourage buying from alternative hydrocarbon suppliers, like Canada, Australia and the U.S.

beauzero

an hour ago

The only other options are psychological or kinetic.

mindslight

10 minutes ago

Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine.

(I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)

loeg

an hour ago

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."

e12e

35 minutes ago

NRK is very aggressive on a/b testing headlines - presumably optimizing for click through rates.

Almost invariably if I read a story in the morning - the title will be different after noon.

andix

an hour ago

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

an hour ago

That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.

lotsofpulp

28 minutes ago

Only because punishment isn't harsh and quick enough for the initial offenders. The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity.

With all the broadband communications and high definition video and audio, it should have been trivial to prove the fraud and disincentivize committing it by sufficiently punishing it.

potato3732842

2 minutes ago

>The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity

The state fell short on that because everyone hates violence so there isn't the political will to deploy it at the drop of a hat multiplied by everyone's pet issues.

hn_throw_250910

2 hours ago

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

an hour ago

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.

GenerWork

an hour ago

I thought this was made up nonsense, but for those who are thinking the same thing as me, a Toronto police officer really recommended doing exactly this [0].

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/10359055/leave-car-keys-the-front...

0xbadcafebee

an hour ago

It's good advice. Losing a car is much less worse than personal injury or worse. Everybody's a toughguy until a methhead who can't feel pain stabs you 15 times. Should the police crack down? Sure, but they aren't magicians, crime isn't gonna magically dissolve tomorrow. In the mean time, keep yourself safe by not inviting harm.

potato3732842

30 minutes ago

This attitude is exactly the problem. It only takes a small fraction of people to fight the meth head for the meth head to choose a different crime.

It's like the "we don't pay ransoms" logic only the math is infinitely more favorable to victims.

vbezhenar

31 minutes ago

I'm living in a third-world country and I think this is madness. It's unimaginable here, to be afraid of "methheads" so much and giving up on your own property. I never saw "methhead" in my life, but I sure would do my best to protect my valuable property. May be I need to work more to buy a car, compared to average Canadian, I don't know.

koakuma-chan

27 minutes ago

Yeah Canadian government is crazy. They made drugs legal, and they also let criminals go after they get caught.

koakuma-chan

29 minutes ago

Yeah and you can probably get insurance against theft right?

zdragnar

20 minutes ago

It becomes unaffordable pretty quickly for a lot of people when such theft becomes endemic.

bluefirebrand

26 minutes ago

If the culture was "if a methhead tries to stab you, you can and should use any force necessary to stop them" that might be different

But no, the culture in Canada is "Check your privilege and let the poor methhead stab you"

No joke, people in Canada genuinely do not think they can or should use force to protect themselves from dangerous threats

dismalaf

an hour ago

Recently a man was shot and killed in a home invasion defending his family (also in Ontario). The police first claimed it was a targeted killing (implying the man was a gang member), then when that turned out false, the police said you should comply with home invaders instead of resisting...

https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/warmington-top-cop-wa...

Insanity

43 minutes ago

So.. I live in Ontario. And I actually agree with that statement. Why would you resist and risk your life instead of just complying? Material things aren't worth actually getting hurt over.

The implication that "the police say this because they can't stop the crime" is IMO not the right take-away. The correct take-away is that a certain level of crime is unavoidable in practice, and you should prioritize your life over your property.

petsfed

a few seconds ago

The problem with this line of thinking is that home invasion is a different kind of crime from breaking and entering.

With breaking and entering, the goal is to get what they can with a minimum of fuss. Locked doors, barking dogs, automatic lights, security systems, etc are all great deterrents, because the goal is to get as much as possible while avoiding capture. The table stakes are that the burglar can get in and out without getting caught.

With home invasion, the whole threat profile is different. The operating premise is that the invader will use violence or the threat of it to brutalize the home occupants into facilitating the theft, the escape, and avoidance of prosecution.

Think of how wild animals engage in violence: they will not enter into a violent situation unless trapped (either physically, or by circumstance - e.g. fight or starve), or they think they can win the fight without sustaining any substantial injury. In the case of a home invasion, you are trapped, but the other guy has chosen the fight.

All of that to say, compliance should be done in the light of keeping yourself and those around you together and unharmed, and not willy-nilly. Obviously, don't pick a fight over a TV. But understand that if they continue their breaking-and-entering after they know you're there, compliance may be insufficient to protect your life.

psunavy03

34 minutes ago

The entire point is that in a home invasion, you have no guarantee the criminal is only interested in your property. If someone deliberately busts into an occupied house, there is a nonzero chance they are also interested in killing or assaulting (sexually or otherwise) the occupants.

yostrovs

34 minutes ago

Armed intruders can demand something one minute and something else the next. They may be mentally deranged, they may be sexually devious, there's a good chance they don't have a lot of moral limitations. The issue is not material things. That there's an optimal approach to dealing with them, when you're unarmed, is just not true. You must do what seems best given the situation.

Taek

an hour ago

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?

Simulacra

an hour ago

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.