Hawsepipe - Maritime Job Board with Scam Moderation Built In
Two-Sided Job Board for an Isle of Man Maritime Publisher
Designed and built a clickable trust and safety console for a maritime and offshore job board: every job is scored for scam signals before it goes live, moderators decide held jobs against a 4 working hour target with the evidence beside the ad, and reports, reviews and employer verification run from the same console - built to keep out jobs that ask seafarers to pay.
Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.
Impact
Dashboard, moderation queue, moderation case with its evidence panel, reports and reviews, and employers with a detail drawer. Each of the 15 demo cases opens its own case page.
A risk score from 0 to 100 decides what happens on submit: below 30 the job publishes, 30 to 69 it is held, 70 and above it is held and a moderator is alerted.
Fee wording, free email domains, salary against the rank median, messaging-app-only contact, account age, vessel mismatch, text similarity, logo similarity and the payment provider's fraud score, each with its weight and detail.
20 employer accounts from shipowners to crewing agencies, 15 moderation cases across held, flagged and decided, 12 reports, 7 seafarer reviews and 6 staff users.
The Problem
Skerrydown started as a maritime news site with a jobs page. Employers emailed ads to an editor who pasted them into the CMS, took payment by bank transfer and chased invoices by hand. Seafarers applied with CVs that left out whether their certificates were valid for the contract, and scammers copied real companies' names onto fake vacancies that asked for "processing fees" to a mobile wallet. Two reached the site in 2025 before readers reported them, and the editor had no way to see which accounts, emails or cards were connected.
Our Solution
Hawsepipe replaces that with self-serve employer accounts and card payments through a payment provider, structured seafarer profiles where certificate expiry is checked against the contract dates, and a moderation queue with automatic scam signals. The build is Skerrydown's staff console: held jobs, reports, reviews and employer verification in one place, each decision shown with its evidence.
The Challenge: A Job Board Scammers Want to Use
Fake crewing jobs that ask seafarers for "visa" or "training" fees are the industry's best-known scam. A maritime job board has to keep them out without slowing down the genuine shipowners, ship managers and agencies that pay for it.
Fees Hidden in Job Ads
The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 generally requires that no recruitment or placement fees are borne by the seafarer. Scam ads ask for "visa processing", "document verification" or "training package" charges in many wordings and languages, and one slipping through costs seafarers money and the board its trust.
The Same Operator Under a New Name
A suspended scammer can return the next week with a new company name, a free email address and a copied logo. Without linking accounts by payment card, device, IP range or email domain, each new account looks clean on its own.
Certificates That Must Last the Contract
STCW certificates of competency are generally revalidated at intervals of no more than five years and the seafarer medical certificate is generally valid for at most two. A crewing manager needs to know whether each one is valid from the joining date to the end of the contract.
Verifying Employers Across Many Regimes
Employers come from many countries, and crewing agencies are licensed by their own state, such as the RPSL in India or the Department of Migrant Workers in the Philippines. A verified badge has to mean the registry, licence and sanctions checks were actually done.
Our Approach: From Maritime Rules to a Clickable Console
Spec and Rules Research
Mapped 9 user roles and 48 screens across the public site, the mobile-first seafarer app, the employer portal and the staff console, plus 5 slide-over panels and about 18 modals. Defined the data model for employers, seafarers, sea service, certificates, jobs, applications, moderation cases and rules, reports, reviews, packages, credits and orders. Wrote down the rules the design follows: MLC 2006 on fees and blacklisting, STCW certificates, medical certificate validity, crewing agency licensing, Isle of Man data protection, VAT and Google for Jobs structured data.
Clickable Demo on a Production UI Kit
Built the staff console's 5 key screens on a production UI kit: the dashboard with revenue by package, queue by risk band, moderation health and scam watch; the moderation queue with tabs, risk filter, preview and bulk approve for low-risk items; the case page with the job as seafarers see it beside the evidence; reports and reviews; and the employers table with registry, licence and sanctions checks. Decisions run on local state.
What a Production Build Adds
The public and seafarer screens (job search, job detail with a fit check, a phone apply flow and certificates) and the employer portal (post a job, applicant inbox, billing). Integrations with Stripe for checkout, billing, fraud scoring and tax, Xero, search, email and push alerts, OpenCorporates, ComplyAdvantage sanctions screening, vessel data by IMO number, CV parsing, malware scanning, bot protection and the Google Indexing API. Staff roles with two-factor sign-in and an audit record of every moderation decision, suspension, refund and privacy request.
Why It Works: Every Hold Shows Its Evidence
Signals With Their Reasons
Each held job lists every matched signal with its weight and detail: the exact fee phrase found, the salary as a multiple of the rank median, an IMO number that fails its check digit. A moderator sees why the job scored high before reading the ad.
Connected Accounts in Plain Sight
The evidence panel links accounts that share a payment card fingerprint, device, IP range or email domain, and shows text similarity to jobs already removed as scams. A new account tied to a suspended one is visible on the first case.
Decisions That Carry Their Consequences
Reject takes a reason from a fixed list, request changes tells the employer what to fix, and remove and suspend asks for a refund decision and warns seafarers who already applied. Reports turn amber after 12 hours and red after 24, so none sit unread.
Built to Protect Seafarers
Hawsepipe never charges seafarers and has no feature for employers to rate or flag them. Reviews of employers are moderated before they publish, medical certificates are stored without medical details, only issuer, fit status, limitations and expiry, and seafarers choose whether employers can search their profile.
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Enterprise Software Engineering - Human + AI
Contact Us
Locations
Global Headquarters
21 Merchant Road, 3rd Floor, Singapore 058267
Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
India Office
402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
Engineering and delivery center
© 2026 - Copyright. All Rights reserved Oceanlab