It actually became a pretty notorious scandal in the mid 19th c., but not for people selling them and pretending they were lost ( if you think about it, so many people are in and around a ship to make it go, see it in harbor, etc., it's rather hard to make it secretly disappear and reappear under a new name) . British shipowners were taking some very poor-condition vessels, overloading them and collecting the insurance when they broke up. The result was often profits for the owners , and dead seamen. One reformer, Samual Plimsoll, wrote a furious polemic on the subject, Our Seamen: An Appeal , in 1872, and started a call for reform . A bill was introduced in 1875, with very modest regulations: Plimsoll agreed to vote for it but then it was scrapped, supposedly squashed by the ship owners in Parliament. Plimsoll made such an outcry at that, and it created such a scandal, however, that a bill giving inspection power to the Board of Trade was passed a few years later. Since then, ships have a Plimsoll Line saying how much they can be loaded. It's actually several lines, for several different places and times. The lowest one ( for the lightest cargo) is for the North Atlantic in winter, when the weather and seas would be the roughest..