Free for seafarers — never pay for a job Check a crewing agency For employers

How to check a crewing agency before you sign

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Most fake job offers at sea look real at first: a logo, a vessel name, a salary in dollars. The difference is in the details you can check yourself. These five checks take about ten minutes.

1. Ask for the licence number

Under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (MLC, Regulation 1.4), a country that ratified the convention must make sure that seafarer recruitment and placement services working on its territory are licensed, certified or regulated. A real agency knows its licence number and gives it without problems. If the answer is "we work with many shipowners, no licence is needed", be careful.

2. Check the licence in an official registry

Look the agency up in the official list of the authority in its country — not on the agency's own website and not on a screenshot it sent you.

  • Use our free Check a crewing agency page: it searches the official registries of the Philippines, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Croatia, Georgia, Ukraine, Russia and Sri Lanka.
  • Every result shows the source and the date of the data. Open the source link and confirm the current status there: a licence can be suspended or cancelled at any time.
  • "Not found" does not prove the agency is fake — we do not cover every country. It means you should ask for the licence number and check it with the authority in that country.

3. Compare the details

The name in the registry, the city and the website should match what the agency told you. Warning signs:

  • a website or email that looks like a well-known company, but the domain is slightly different;
  • only a mobile number and a free email address;
  • an "office" that nobody can visit.

4. Read the contract before you travel

Ask for the Seafarer Employment Agreement (SEA) before you buy tickets or leave home. It should name the shipowner (employer), the vessel or fleet, your rank, wages, the length of the contract and who pays for repatriation. If the agency will "give the contract on board", do not go.

5. Never pay for the job

A licensed recruitment service must not charge seafarers for finding them a job (MLC, Standard A1.4). If someone asks for a "processing fee", "training at our centre", "visa fee" or a deposit for a guaranteed place, stop. Read Seafarers never pay for a job for what the convention allows and what it does not.

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