Sanctions Screening API — OFAC, UK & UN

Screen person and organization names against current official sanctions-list data from OFAC, the UK Sanctions List, and the UN Security Council Consolidated List. The Actor returns ranked candidate records, aliases, identifiers, programs or regimes, and explicit ambiguity states for manual review.

Important: this Actor provides candidate-screening assistance only. It does not decide whether a person or organization is legally sanctioned. Every result sets reviewRequired=true; consequential decisions require verification against the underlying official record and appropriate human/legal review.

What this Actor checks

The Actor normalizes and indexes four official datasets:

• OFAC SDN — U.S. Treasury Sanctions List Service SDN XML
• OFAC consolidated non-SDN — U.S. Treasury Sanctions List Service consolidated XML
• UK Sanctions List — official FCDO CSV
• UN Security Council Consolidated List — official UN XML

The normalized cache retains source URLs and SHA-256 provenance for each refresh.

Input

{
  "queries": ["Example Person", "Example Trading Company"],
  "maxCandidatesPerQuery": 5
}

queries accepts 1–50 names. maxCandidatesPerQuery accepts 1–10.

Operational cache controls are hidden from the Store form. Under Apify limited permissions, the Actor creates and maintains its own per-user named cache.

Output

Each query produces one Dataset row with resolutionState, optional preferredCandidateStableId, match scores, ranked candidates, source metadata, aliases, programs/regimes, identifiers, addresses, reviewRequired=true, and a decision disclaimer.

Resolution states:

• exact_unique_candidate
• exact_ambiguous
• fuzzy_unique_candidate
• fuzzy_ambiguous
• no_candidate

no_candidate does not mean “not sanctioned”; it only means the name-only matcher did not return a candidate above its configured floor.

Matching behavior

The operating policy was selected on a deterministic development split and validated on a separate test split:

• candidate floor: 0.70
• fuzzy candidate score: >= 0.90
• minimum top-1 / top-2 margin: >= 0.01
• exact normalized names shared by multiple official stable IDs always return exact_ambiguous

The Actor never converts these states into a binary sanctions/legal conclusion.

Freshness and cache

The Actor creates official-sanctions-screening-runtime-cache-v2 under Apify LIMITED_PERMISSIONS. Apify retains access to Actor-created named storage for later runs by the same user.

Default cache TTL: 12 hours.

A refresh downloads the official files, normalizes them, stores an integrity-checked compressed snapshot, and rebuilds the exact/trigram index. Warm-cache runs are much faster.

Pricing

Primary PPE event: screening-result.

One event is charged for one input name screened, regardless of how many candidates are returned.

• FREE: $0.0050 / screening ($5.00 / 1K)
• BRONZE: $0.0045 / screening
• SILVER: $0.0040 / screening
• GOLD / PLATINUM / DIAMOND: $0.0035 / screening
• Actor start: $0.00005

The Actor respects the run's maximum-charge budget and conservatively bounds screenings before charging custom events.

Safety and review guidance

Use this Actor to prioritize official records for review, not to make automatic adverse decisions.

For consequential workflows:

1. Review the returned official-source candidate.
2. Compare identifiers, aliases, addresses, entity type, and programs/regimes.
3. Confirm the current official source directly.
4. Escalate ambiguous or high-impact cases to a qualified reviewer.

Name-only similarity cannot establish identity.

Data sources

• OFAC Sanctions List Service: https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-list-service
• UK Sanctions List: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uk-sanctions-list
• UN Security Council Consolidated List: https://main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/content/un-sc-consolidated-list

Limits

• Maximum 50 names per Store run.
• Name matching alone cannot resolve every transliteration, alias, or identity collision.
• Official lists change over time; use fresh source records for consequential review.
• This Actor is not legal advice, KYC certification, AML certification, or a substitute for a compliance program.