Sanctions Screening — OFAC & UN Watchlists

Screen people and companies against the official OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated and UN Security Council sanctions lists. Alias-aware fuzzy matching with a 0–100 score and risk level, so spelling variants like AL-QA'IDA / al qaida and Ivan Ivanov / IVANOV, Ivan Ivanovich are actually caught.

Free official government sources. No API key, no login, no anti-bot.

Why this one

The lists are free — the friction was never access. It's that OFAC ships a headerless, fixed-column CSV with aliases in a separate file, the UN ships a bespoke XML, and screening a name needs alias-aware fuzzy matching, not string equality. This actor does all three and hands you a decision.

Two modes

• Screen — give it names → get candidate matches with a score, risk level, sanctions programs and source.
• Dump — leave names empty → get the consolidated, deduped list itself as a dataset.

What you get

Field	Description
query	The name you screened
matchScore	0–100 similarity (100 = exact after normalisation)
riskLevel	confirmed_match · high · medium · low · no_match
matchType	exact · exact_alias · name · alias
matchedName / matchedOn	The listed entry, and the exact string that matched
entityType	individual · entity · vessel
programs	Sanctions programs (e.g. UKRAINE-EO13662, Al-Qaida)
aliases	Known aliases for the listed entry
title / remarks	Designation and notes (DOB, passport, addresses)
sourceLabel / uid	Which official list, and its record ID
status	match or clear (clean names are returned too, not dropped)

How to use it

1. Paste the names to screen (one per line is fine).
2. Pick the lists — OFAC SDN alone is the common default; add UN Consolidated for broader coverage.
3. Tune minimum match score: 75 balanced · 60 catches more spelling variants (more false positives) · 90 near-exact only.

Input

{
  "names": ["Ivan Ivanov", "Acme Trading LLC"],
  "sources": ["ofac_sdn", "un_consolidated"],
  "minMatchScore": 75,
  "maxMatchesPerName": 10
}

Sample output

[
  {
    "query": "Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov",
    "matchScore": 100,
    "riskLevel": "confirmed_match",
    "matchType": "exact",
    "matchedName": "IVANOV, Ivan Ivanovich",
    "matchedOn": "IVANOV, Ivan Ivanovich",
    "entityType": "individual",
    "programs": "UKRAINE-EO13662",
    "aliases": "IVANOV, Vanya | I. Ivanov",
    "remarks": "DOB 01 Jan 1970; nationality Russia",
    "sourceLabel": "OFAC SDN (US Treasury)",
    "uid": "12345",
    "status": "match"
  },
  {
    "query": "Acme Trading LLC",
    "matchScore": 0,
    "riskLevel": "no_match",
    "matchedName": null,
    "status": "clear"
  }
]

Typical uses

• KYC / onboarding checks — screen a customer or supplier list before you transact.
• Continuous monitoring — schedule it over your customer book; lists change and yesterday's clear name may be listed today.
• Vendor & counterparty due diligence — batch-screen a procurement list.
• Building a compliance dataset — dump mode gives you the consolidated list to load into your own system.

Pricing

$2.00 / 1,000 screened names ($0.002 per result), plus a near-zero start fee. Clean names are returned as clear rows so you have an auditable record of what was checked. Never charged beyond maxItems.

⚠️ Important — what this is and isn't

• This is decision-support, not legal advice, and not a certified compliance determination. A match is a candidate for human review, never an automatic conclusion.
• Fuzzy matching cuts both ways: a low threshold produces false positives; a high one can miss transliteration variants. Always have a human review hits before acting.
• Coverage is limited to the lists you select. It does not include every national list (e.g. EU, UK OFSI, Swiss SECO) — absence of a match is not proof a party is unsanctioned.
• Lists are fetched live at run time, so results reflect the sources as of that run. Record the run date.

FAQ & limitations

• Do I need an API key? No. OFAC and the UN publish these files openly.
• Are aliases included? Yes — OFAC's separate ALT.CSV is fetched and attached, so alias hits are found.
• Why did a clean name still return a row? Deliberate: a clear row proves the name was screened.
• How current is the data? As current as the source files at run time; OFAC updates frequently.
• Can I add more lists? EU/UK lists aren't wired yet — the parser is source-agnostic, so they're a natural next addition.

Related actors

• Email Verifier · Website Contact Finder — the rest of a counterparty-diligence stack.
• SEC EDGAR Filings — corporate filings and material events for the same entities.
• GitHub Repo Scraper · npm Package Info — supply-chain diligence on the technical side.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Sanctions Screening — OFAC & UN Watchlists declares all 15 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Sanctions Screening include query, matchScore, riskLevel, matchType, matchedName and matchedOn.
• Sanctions Screening needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Sanctions Screening's 6 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Sanctions Screening documents matchScore as: How well this row matched the query, on the Actor's own scale.
• Every number published about Sanctions Screening is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Sanctions Screening is filed under business and automation so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Sanctions Screening reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.