Sanctions Screening: EU, UK & US OFAC Lists (Official)

Screen the names of people, companies, vessels and aircraft against the official sanctions lists of the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States (OFAC SDN + Consolidated) in one run, and get for each name a clear POTENTIAL_MATCH / NO_MATCH result with the matching list entries, a score and the reasons.

The lists are downloaded fresh from the authorities at every run: 32,000+ entries and 95,000+ names and aliases. No third-party database, no stale copy.

What can you do with it?

• ✅ KYC / AML onboarding: screen new customers, suppliers or partners before doing business.
• 🔁 Periodic re-screening of your whole customer base (thousands of names per run).
• 🚢 Trade & shipping compliance: screen counterparties, vessels (IMO numbers) and aircraft.
• 📡 Monitoring: schedule the Actor to get only the new designations and delistings since the previous run.
• 📥 Export: the full lists in one clean, documented schema for your own systems.

Why this Actor?

	This Actor	Typical sanctions checkers
EU + UK + US OFAC (SDN and non-SDN) in one run	✅	⚠️ often OFAC only
Official files downloaded at every run	✅ publication date of each list in every result	❌ old copies
Spelling variants, transliterations, typos	✅ "Vladimir Putn", "Al Qaida" = "AL QA'IDA"	⚠️ exact or naive fuzzy
Any script	✅ Cyrillic, Arabic… ("Владимир Путин" finds PUTIN)	❌
Name order and middle names	✅ "Kim Jong Un" = "Jong Un KIM", "Vladimir Putin" = "Vladimir Vladimirovich PUTIN"	⚠️
Fewer false positives	✅ birth year and country checks, weak aliases flagged, legal forms ignored	❌ every "Ali" is a hit
Explainable results	✅ score + reasons ("name 100%", "birth year matches")	❌
Audit trail	✅ one row per name, including NO_MATCH, with lists and dates checked	⚠️
Monitoring of new designations & delistings	✅	❌

Measured quality (on the real lists): 300 listed names picked at random and altered (typo, reversed order, missing middle name, lower case) → 99.7% found. About 14 ms per name: thousands of names per run.

Input

Screen names (one result per name, in order):

{ "names": ["Vladimir Putin", "Rosneft", "John Smith"] }

Add details when you have them, they remove most false positives:

{
    "records": [
        { "name": "Vladimir Putin", "type": "person", "birthDate": "1952-10-07", "country": "RU" },
        { "name": "Banco Nacional de Cuba", "type": "organization" },
        { "name": "Kim Jong Un", "type": "person", "birthYear": 1984 }
    ]
}

Field	Description
names	Names to screen, any script
records	Names with type (person, organization, vessel, aircraft), birthDate or birthYear, country (ISO code or name)
entityType	Type of the plain names (default: any)
minScore	Minimum score, 60–100 (default 85; raise to 90–95 for fewer, stronger matches)
maxMatchesPerName	Matches returned per name (default 10)
includeWeakAliases	Keep the aliases flagged "low quality" by the authorities, with a 10-point penalty (default true)
lists	EU, UK, OFAC-SDN, OFAC-CONS (default: all)

Export & monitoring: exportEntries: true, then optionally exportTypes, listedSince (EU and UK publish listing dates), onlyNewSinceLastRun (first run saves a baseline, then each run returns added and removed entries) and maxResults.

Output

Real example (names: ["Vladimir Putin"], shortened):

{
    "query": "Vladimir Putin",
    "status": "POTENTIAL_MATCH",
    "matchCount": 3,
    "bestScore": 100,
    "bestConfidence": "high",
    "bestMatchName": "Vladimir Vladimirovich PUTIN",
    "bestMatchType": "person",
    "bestMatchList": "OFAC-SDN",
    "listsWithMatches": ["EU", "OFAC-SDN", "UK"],
    "matches": [
        {
            "score": 100,
            "confidence": "high",
            "matchedName": "Vladimir PUTIN",
            "reasons": ["name 100%"],
            "list": "OFAC-SDN",
            "entryId": "35096",
            "type": "person",
            "name": "Vladimir Vladimirovich PUTIN",
            "birthDates": ["1952-10-07"],
            "birthPlaces": ["Leningrad, Russia"],
            "nationalities": ["Russia"],
            "programs": ["RUSSIA-EO14024"],
            "sourceUrl": "https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=35096"
        }
    ],
    "listsChecked": { "EU": "2026-09-22", "UK": "2026-10-02", "OFAC-SDN": "2026-10-01", "OFAC-CONS": "2026-09-14" },
    "listsUnavailable": [],
    "minScore": 85
}

Each match also has aliases, gender, countryCodes, addresses, identifiers (passports, national IDs, registration numbers, IMO…), positions, sanctions (asset freeze, travel ban… for the UK), listedOn, unReference and remarks.

Score and confidence: 97–100 = high (same name, any order, any spelling of the legal form); 90–97 = medium (spelling variant, typo, missing middle name or patronymic); 85–90 = low (partial name, e.g. another first name in front). A matching birth year adds 5 points, a different one removes 25; a matching country adds 3, a different one removes 5; a weak alias removes 10.

Common names: about 5% of random common names ("Sergei Ivanov", "Wei Zhang", "Mohammed Khan") are flagged, because people with exactly these names are on the lists. Give a birth year and a country in records: a different birth year clears the match.

Important

• This is a screening aid: a POTENTIAL_MATCH must be reviewed by a person (same name ≠ same person). It is not legal advice.
• listsChecked gives the publication date of each list used. If an authority's server is unavailable, the Actor says so in listsUnavailable and in the run status: a name is never reported as checked against a list that was not loaded.
• UN Security Council designations are included through their implementation in the EU and UK lists (unReference).

Pricing

Pay per name screened (NO_MATCH included: the check is the service) or per list entry exported. Empty or invalid inputs are free. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops exactly there.

Sources & licences

• EU Consolidated Financial Sanctions List — © European Union, reuse authorised (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU).
• UK Sanctions List (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office) — contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• US OFAC SDN and Consolidated (non-SDN) lists — U.S. Department of the Treasury, public domain.

This Actor is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Commission, the UK Government or the U.S. Department of the Treasury.