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Report patterns — if you spot something that looks like genuine evidence of illegal fishing, report it to your national authority. Details in .
Donations are gratefully received and used to keep this service running. We're not a registered charity; donations are not tax-deductible. The project has no employees or paid contractors.
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Live near a protected area? Get an email when CAUGHT detects a fishing vessel inside the closures you care about — as it happens. Alerts go to your account's email address, and every one carries a one-click unsubscribe.
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Alerts are an automated triage signal from live vessel tracking — a cue to look, not proof of an offence. We store only your email address and your selected areas, and use them for nothing else.
About CAUGHT
Some of Britain's most protected waters are still being fished.
CAUGHT watches every legally closed area around the United Kingdom, gathers the evidence from
satellites and vessel trackers, and puts it through automated analysis and AI review — so that a
signal which used to take weeks of expert work to assess can be judged in hours, while it is still
worth acting on.
What we're trying to do
Enforcement at sea is thin. A patrol vessel cannot be everywhere, and a boat that wants to work a
closed area unseen has every opportunity to do it. Most of what happens out there is never witnessed
by anybody at all.
CAUGHT exists to change that, in four steps.
Gather. We watch every legally closed area in UK waters — Scotland, England, Wales,
Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Around 440 closure boundaries in all:
places where fishing is banned outright, and places where dragging heavy gear across the seabed is.
Into that we pour live vessel-tracking broadcasts, satellite radar that sees hulls through cloud and
darkness, optical imagery, official licence registers and vessel registries.
Process. Raw position data is not evidence. Our algorithms reconstruct what a vessel was
actually doing — separating a boat fishing from a boat passing through by the shape of its
track, its speed distribution and how long it lingered; picking unlit vessels out of radar noise;
and matching detections back to the boat that made them. This is the work that used to take an
analyst days per case.
Judge. Every case is then assessed by our AI review system against three independent
questions, and only escalated when all three are answered strongly. A human reviews everything
that clears that bar before it goes anywhere. The section below explains exactly how it works.
Respond. When a watched vessel enters a closure and is broadcasting, the alarm fires
immediately — because the only thing that ever really settles one of these cases is somebody
going out and looking, and that has to happen while the boat is still at sea. Confirmed cases are
put to the authorities, and we use freedom of information requests to check them against the
official tracking records they already hold. Cases that stand up get reported. Cases that don't are
publicly resolved and closed, on the record.
Being straight about speed, because it varies: the live alarm is immediate for a
vessel that is broadcasting its position. Satellite evidence arrives on the satellite's schedule —
typically a few days. Full case review runs weekly. We are steadily pulling those numbers down; where
we have rebuilt a step ourselves, the delay on it has gone from days to minutes.
That last step is the one that keeps us honest. We would rather withdraw a case in public than leave
a boat under a cloud it doesn't deserve.
Why closed areas matter
Closed areas work when they're respected. After bottom-towed gear was excluded from the Lyme Bay
reserve in southwest England in 2008, University of Plymouth
monitoring recorded reef species up 95% and fish abundance up nearly 400% in the years
that followed.
And the damage is concentrated in very few boats. Oceana found that just 10 vessels
were responsible for a quarter of all suspected bottom trawling across the UK's offshore Marine
Protected Areas. Our own caseload says the same thing: a small, repeat-offending minority inside an
otherwise law-abiding fleet.
Breaking a closure is also now being punished. In May 2025 the Marine Management Organisation secured
its first-ever conviction for breaching an MPA byelaw
— a £40,000 fine — in a case built on vessel-tracking evidence of exactly the kind this site
surfaces.
What a case is — and what it isn't
A case on this site is a reason to look, not a verdict.
Satellites and vessel trackers have well-known blind spots, and we would rather be corrected than
overstate what we can see. Nothing here is proof that an offence took place.
🎣 CAUGHT — all three questions below answered
strongly, and checked by a person. Nothing else reaches this state.
🔍 Review — flagged, but at least one of the
three is not established. Each case says which one, and why.
✓ Resolved — assessed and dismissed: permitted
gear, out of season, the closure doesn't reach that vessel, or simply too weak to stand.
How the AI review works
Deciding whether a boat broke a rule is really three separate questions, and they are usually
answered by three different kinds of evidence. Our review system asks them independently:
Was it fishing — here, and then? Not merely present, and not passing through. Judged from
track shape, speed, how many separate working bouts there were, and how long it stayed.
What gear does this boat actually use? Established from licence registers, official vessel
registries and hand-checked sources tied to the vessel's registration — never from a guess about
its behaviour.
What was prohibited there, at that time? Read from the closure's own legal instrument,
including the parts that trip people up: gear carve-outs, seasonal windows, tonnage limits.
The weakest of the three decides. Overwhelming evidence that
a vessel was fishing counts for nothing if we cannot establish what gear it uses. Confirmed gear
counts for nothing if the closure permits that gear, or wasn't in force that month. There is no
averaging and no benefit of the doubt in our favour — a case is only escalated when all three are
strong, and if any of them is unknown the system says so and stops.
That is a deliberately expensive standard, and it is meant to be. It means we publish far fewer
accusations than our data could support. It also means the ones we do publish are ones we can explain,
line by line, to the person on the other end of them.
Every case carries a printable evidence pack: the vessel, the closure and the law that applies there,
the timings, a map, and — deliberately — a section listing what we don't know.
What we've learned so far
The overwhelming majority of the fleet fishes within the rules. We watch several
thousand vessels, and only a few dozen have ever generated a case at all. A handful account for most
of them. This isn't a story about a rule-breaking industry — it's about a small minority hidden inside
a law-abiding one, and handing the authorities a short, checkable list instead of an ocean of noise.
Cases over time
Cases per day, by where each one stands now. Amber stretching back more than a week means the review
queue isn't being cleared fast enough.
Everything on this site concerns places where a rule already exists. That is a narrow slice of the
picture. Across the wider UK marine protected area network, industrial fishing —
including bottom trawling and dredging, the most destructive methods for seabed habitats — is
largely permitted. Nobody is breaking a rule, because there is no rule to break. A
protected area that allows the very activity it was created to guard against protects very little, and
no amount of enforcement fixes that. It takes a change in the law.
So every case here also has a “Write to your MP” step: open a case, and it will find
your constituency MP from your postcode and draft a letter you can edit and send yourself. Sea
fisheries are devolved, so where a closure lies in Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish waters it points
you at your MSPs,
Members of the Senedd
or MLAs as
well — they are the ones who can change the rule for that site.
Groups already campaigning on exactly this, and worth supporting directly:
Greenpeace UK
and Open Seas.
Where our data comes from
CAUGHT combines several independent sources rather than relying on any one of them. We are grateful
to all of them, and to the public bodies that publish this material openly.
Satellite fishing detections and radar — Global Fishing Watch,
whose open data made this project possible in the first place — please
support their work
Our own satellite radar and vessel-tracking pipelines, run in-house so cases surface in
hours rather than days
Radar and optical imagery — Copernicus (Sentinel-1 & -2), European Union space programme
This site is a research project. It makes no warranty of accuracy or completeness. Vessel names and identifiers shown are derived from publicly-broadcast AIS data. If you are an owner or operator and believe a vessel has been incorrectly characterised, please use the feedback button — corrections are welcomed.