BaFin Warnings Scraper – Unauthorised Firms & KYC Screening

Get the investor and consumer warnings of BaFin (Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) as clean, flat JSON: unauthorised firms (unerlaubte Geschäfte, § 37 KWG), scam and clone websites, identity-theft warnings, fake job offers, plus BaFin supervisory measures and sanctions (fines, orders, licence revocations, winding-up orders). In screen mode you upload a list of company names or domains and get a fuzzy match score against the current warnings, ready for compliance, KYC, AML and merchant onboarding checks.

No API key, no login, no proxy. Data comes from BaFin's own public RSS feeds and news/warning pages on bafin.de.

Who is it for?

• Compliance, KYC / KYB and AML teams that must check new clients, partners or payees against regulator warnings
• Payment providers, banks, brokers and marketplaces onboarding merchants or affiliates
• Ad networks and domain registrars filtering scam finance websites
• Journalists, researchers and consumer protection tracking new investment scams in Germany
• AI agents and automations (n8n, Make, Zapier, MCP) that need a simple "is this firm on a BaFin warning?" lookup

Why this actor?

• Focused on BaFin warnings and sanctions (not the register of licensed institutions).
• Screening built in: names and domains are normalised (legal forms like GmbH, Ltd, AG removed, (.) obfuscation resolved, URLs reduced to domains) and scored 0–100. Exact domain hits score 100.
• Flat, AI-friendly rows: firm name, all named domains, other trade names, warning type, legal basis, date, BaFin URL.
• Privacy-first: only company and website data. If a warning names a natural person, that name is replaced with [name redacted] and personNameRedacted is set to true.
• Polite and compliant: reads only pages that BaFin's robots.txt allows (RSS feeds and public pages), no search-form scraping, no anti-bot circumvention.
• Fast and cheap: the default run finishes in about 10 seconds.

Coverage – please read

BaFin publishes its warnings as news items. Without using the robots-disallowed search form, the publicly machine-readable sources are BaFin's RSS feeds (German and English, all news + measures) and the warning overview pages. Together they cover the most recent weeks (in our test: 60 warnings and measures, about 5 weeks back). This actor is therefore ideal for daily or weekly monitoring and for screening against current warnings. It is not a complete historical archive. Schedule it daily and store the results if you need a long history.

Input

Field	Description
mode	list (latest warnings) or screen (check names/domains)
queries	screen mode: company names, brand names or domains/URLs
lastDays	list mode: only warnings from the last N days (0 = all available)
maxItems	list mode: maximum rows
keywords	list mode: keep only warnings containing one of these words (e.g. crypto, Festgeld, WhatsApp)
includeMeasures	also return supervisory measures and sanctions (default on)
preferredLanguage	en or de when a warning exists in both languages
fetchDetails	open each warning page to extract all domains, trade names and the legal basis (default on)
minScore	screen mode: score from which a hit counts as matched (default 85)
maxMatchesPerQuery	screen mode: matches returned per name (default 3)

List mode example:

{ "mode": "list", "lastDays": 30, "maxItems": 20, "keywords": ["crypto", "identity"] }

Screen mode example:

{
  "mode": "screen",
  "queries": ["landshypotek-bnk.com", "https://www.klever-beratung.de/jobs", "Marsh Securities Ltd", "Example Trading Ltd"],
  "minScore": 85
}

Output

Real row from a test run (list mode):

{
  "title": "landshypotek-bnk(.)com: Bafin warnt vor Website und weist auf mutmaßlichen Identitätsdiebstahl hin",
  "companyName": "landshypotek-bnk.com",
  "otherNames": ["Landshypotek Bank"],
  "domains": ["landshypotek-bnk.com"],
  "websites": ["https://landshypotek-bnk.com"],
  "warningType": "identity_theft",
  "category": "consumer_warning",
  "legalBasis": ["§ 37 Absatz 4 Kreditwesengesetz"],
  "publishedAt": "2026-11-06T08:05:00+00:00",
  "summary": "Die Finanzaufsicht Bafin warnt vor Angeboten über die Website landshypotek-bnk(.)com. Nach Erkenntnissen der Bafin werden dort ohne Erlaubnis Bankgeschäfte angeboten.",
  "language": "de",
  "url": "https://www.bafin.de/SharedDocs/Veroeffentlichungen/DE/Verbrauchermitteilung/unerlaubte/2026/meldung_2026_11_06_landshypotek_bnk_com.html",
  "source": "BaFin (bafin.de)",
  "snapshotAt": "2026-11-07T20:31:38+00:00",
  "personNameRedacted": false,
  "status": "ok"
}

Screen mode adds query, matched, matchScore and matchedOn (real result):

{
  "query": "Marsh Securities Ltd",
  "matched": true,
  "matchScore": 100,
  "matchedOn": "name:Marsh Securities Limited",
  "companyName": "marsh-ltd.com",
  "otherNames": ["Marsh Securities Limited"],
  "domains": ["marsh-ltd.com"],
  "warningType": "identity_theft",
  "category": "consumer_warning",
  "publishedAt": "2026-11-03T08:25:00+00:00",
  "url": "https://www.bafin.de/SharedDocs/Veroeffentlichungen/DE/Verbrauchermitteilung/unerlaubte/2026/meldung_2026_11_03_marsh_ltd_com.html"
}

A name without a hit returns one row with "matched": false, the best score found and warningsChecked (e.g. {"query": "Example Trading Ltd", "matched": false, "matchScore": 50, "warningsChecked": 60}).

warningType values: unauthorised_business, identity_theft, fake_job_offers, winding_up_or_cease_order, market_manipulation, consumer_warning, and for measures administrative_fine, administrative_fine_financial_reporting, additional_own_funds_requirement, licence_revoked, winding_up_order, supervisory_order, reprimand, measure_kwg_wpig_gwg, measure_wphg, measure_insurance_vag.

category: consumer_warning (warnings about firms/websites) or supervisory_measure (published measures against firms, which are often licensed institutions; filter on this field or turn off includeMeasures).

Pricing

Pay per event, no monthly fee:

• $0.002 per warning returned in list mode (= $2 per 1,000)
• $0.01 per screened name in screen mode, with or without a hit

A default run (20 warnings) costs $0.04. Screening 100 names costs $1.

Use via API, n8n, Make or MCP

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fast_data_asap~bafin-investor-warnings/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode":"screen","queries":["landshypotek-bnk.com","Klever Beratung"]}'

• n8n / Make / Zapier: use the Apify node with actor fast_data_asap/bafin-investor-warnings and the input above; schedule list mode daily for new warnings.
• MCP (Claude, Cursor, other AI agents): https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fast_data_asap/bafin-investor-warnings

Disclaimer

This actor is a technical data retrieval tool. It is not legal advice and not an official BaFin service. Matching is heuristic (fuzzy); a hit or a missing hit says nothing definitive about a company. The BaFin website (bafin.de) is authoritative; always verify results on the linked BaFin page. To check whether a firm is licensed, use BaFin's company database. Names of natural persons are intentionally not returned.