Hijacking requires money, equipment, weapons, planning, experience and contacts with corrupt officials. The loot per vessel ranges from $8 million to $200 million.
Pottengal Mukundan, Director of ICC's Commercial Crime Services states in an IMB press release: "(Piracy) typically involves a mother ship from which to launch the attacks, a supply of automatic weapons, false identity papers for the crew and vessel, fake cargo documents, and a broker network to sell the stolen goods illegally. Individual pirates don't have these resources.
Hijackings are the work of organized crime rings".
The IMB describes the aftermath of a typical hijacking: "The Global Mars has probably been given a new name and repainted. Armed with false registration papers and bills of lading, the pirates - or more likely the mafia bosses pulling the strings - will then try to dispose of their booty. The vessel has probably put in to a port where the false identity of vessel and cargo may escape detection.
Even when identified, the gangs have been known to bribe local officials to allow them to sell the cargo and leave the port".
Such a ship is often "recycled" a few times. It earns its operators an average of $40-50 million per "cycle", according to "The Economist". The pirates contract with sellers or shipping agents to load it with a legitimate consignment of goods or commodities. The sellers and agents are unaware of the true identity of the ship, or of its unsavory "owners/managers".
The pirates invariably produce an authentic vessel registration certificate that they acquired from crooked officials - and provide the sellers or agents with a bill of lading. The payload is then sold to networks of traders in stolen merchandise or to gullible buyers in a different port of destination - and the ship is ready for yet another round.
In January 2002, the Indonesian Navy has permanently stationed six battleships in the Malacca Straits, three of them off the coast of the secessionist region of Aceh. A further 20-30 ships and 10 aircraft conduct daily patrols of the treacherous traffic lane. Some 200-600 ships cross the Straits daily. A mere 50 ships or so are boarded and searched every month.
The Greek government has gunboats patrolling the 2 miles wide Corfu Channel, where yachts frequently fall prey to Albanian pirates. Brazil has imposed an unpopular anti-piracy inspection fee on berthing vessels and used the proceeds to finance a SWAT team to protect ships and their crews while in port. Both India and Thailand have similar units.
International cooperation is also on the rise. About one third of the world's shipping traffic goes through the South China Sea. A conference convened by Japan in March 2000 - Japanese vessels have become favored targets of piracy in the last few years - pushed for the ratification of the International Maritime Organisation's (IMO) 1988 Rome Convention on the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation by Asian and ASEAN countries.