ITF steps up efforts to combat fraudulent manning agents

Lucy Chapman spoke to Steve Trowsdale, ITF Inspectorate coordinator at the International Transport Workers’ Federation, about the organisation’s work protecting seafarers from rogue manning agents.

What is your role at the ITF?

As the ITF Inspectorate coordinator, I have operational responsibility for the 135 inspectors and contacts around the world and a team of nine people in London, most of whom work full time dealing with seafarers’ requests for assistance.

What are rogue manning agents and has there been a rise in this kind of activity?

Rogue manning agents – most people would know them as scammers – tend to be individuals who push themselves forward on social media as manning agents to advertise fake jobs. Seafarers respond because these scammers prey on the desperation of some people for work. They then start charging them using fake visa requests and things like that.

It is on the increase, because so many people are using social media to search for jobs, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn.

Can you give an example of how the scammers operate?

I'm actually tracking one at the moment – an individual who I believe is based in Nigeria and has so far set up about six or seven companies. They're setting up fake visa/immigration companies too.

The one behind this particular scam is looking for shipping firms on Companies House in the UK, then they're taking the company number and making these false stamps with the name of the company and the company number.

Many seafarers, when they see this, look up the firm on Companies House and can see that there is a real registered company. Then they believe that they're dealing with the real thing. The scam can be very difficult to spot.

Is there any immediate support the ITF can offer to seafarers who have been scammed?

In some cases, a seafarers has received a job offer and actually gone to a ship only to find it isn’t even there – or they've even been trafficked onto ships that have been abandoned. We have to use what legislation we can, talk to the Flag and Port States, and try to resolve things. On occasion, we have stepped in to repatriate the seafarer.

What strategies is the ITF employing to tackle the problem?

When we find a website operated by a scammer, we get it shut down. It’s tricky, though, because it's very easy for the scammers to register a domain and put up a website. As fast as we can get them deregistered, they pop up again. It’s a bit like playing whack-a-mole, but hopefully we can keep the number of seafarers that are being scammed to the minimum.

We've also set up a dedicated email address for seafarers to come to us if they want to check the legitimacy of a job offer. To date, this has stopped thousands of seafarers being scammed. We have a dedicated website that guides seafarers through the whole of the recruitment process and actually outlines a lot of the scams that we've identified.

We're also very proactive on social media, periodically pushing out messages to be aware of scams and every time we find a large-scale scam with a company, the ITF and our inspectors share the news. We're members of about 100 seafarer groups with a reach of about 2 million people, so we post on all of those as well.