OFAC Sanctions Intelligence — SDN Screening, Aliases & Entity Resolution

Screen any name, company, vessel or aircraft against the live US Treasury OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanctions list — the authoritative list used for AML/KYC, trade-compliance and due-diligence screening worldwide.

Instead of dumping raw CSV rows, this Actor downloads OFAC's official XML export, parses every one of the ~19,000 sanctioned entities into a clean, normalized record, and runs alias-aware matching so a query that hits an "a.k.a." / "f.k.a." alias resolves to the correct canonical entity.

What makes this different

• Alias-aware matching — matches against primary names and every alias (a.k.a. / f.k.a.), with per-alias strength (strong/weak) retained.
• Entity resolution — each result is one canonical entity with its aliases, addresses, IDs, dates of birth, nationalities, programs and vessel info consolidated into a single record.
• Confidence scoring — every match carries a 0–1 score and a match type (exact, alias, substring, token, fuzzy).
• Normalized fields — title-cased names, split program lists, structured addresses/IDs, deduplicated aliases.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
searchQuery	string	✅	Name, company, vessel or individual to screen (e.g. Gazprombank, Viktor Vekselberg).
entityType	select	—	Filter by type: Individual, Entity, Vessel, Aircraft.
program	string	—	Filter by sanctions program code (e.g. SDGT, RUSSIA-EO14024, IRAN).
minScore	number	—	Minimum match confidence 0–1 (default 0.6).
maxResults	integer	—	Max entities to return (default 20, max 100).

Example input

{
  "searchQuery": "Gazprombank",
  "maxResults": 5
}

Example output

{
  "ofacId": "14985",
  "name": "Gazprombank OAO",
  "nameNormalized": "Gazprombank Oao",
  "entityType": "Entity",
  "programs": ["RUSSIA-EO14024"],
  "programCount": 1,
  "aliases": [
    { "name": "GPB (OAO)", "type": "a.k.a.", "category": "strong" },
    { "name": "Gazprombank", "type": "a.k.a.", "category": "strong" }
  ],
  "aliasCount": 2,
  "addresses": [
    { "address1": "16 Nametkina St.", "city": "Moscow", "postalCode": "117420", "country": "Russia" }
  ],
  "matchScore": 1.0,
  "matchType": "exact",
  "matchedOn": "Gazprombank OAO"
}

Use cases

• AML / KYC onboarding — screen customer and counterparty names during onboarding and periodic review.
• Trade & export compliance — check counterparties, vessels and carriers against sanctions programs.
• Due diligence — quick entity-resolution lookup for M&A, lending and vendor vetting.
• Watchlist monitoring — batch-screen names and alert on new designations.

Data source

US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) — Sanctions List Service. Public, free, no API key required. The SDN list is updated daily; this Actor downloads the latest export on every run.

Disclaimer: Screening results are provided as-is for reference and are not a substitute for a licensed sanctions-screening product or legal advice. Always verify against the official OFAC source.