OFAC SDN screening, in your browser

Both the query and every OFAC name are folded to a comparable form: uppercased, accents stripped, punctuation removed, whitespace collapsed. For entities, common corporate suffixes are also removed for comparison purposes — LLC, LTD, INC, CO, CORP, PLC, SA, AG, GMBH, BV, NV, OOO, OAO, ZAO, JSC, PJSC, LLP, PTE, PTY, SPA, SARL, AS, AB — so Acme Trading Ltd. and ACME TRADING compare equal. The name shown in the results is always OFAC's original string, never the normalised one.

Exact normalised equality scores 100. Token-set overlap compares the sets of words, so word order, middle names and extra words do not defeat a match; full containment of the shorter name in the longer scores high. Character-level edit-distance ratio catches transliteration variants where the letters differ but the shape is the same. The final score is the highest of the three, and the result labels which comparison produced it.

Comparing every query against 39,000+ names with an edit-distance algorithm would be far too slow in a browser. An inverted index maps each token to the entries containing it, so only plausible candidates are scored; exact matches short-circuit through a hash lookup. Very common tokens are skipped during candidate gathering, which is why a single extremely common word on its own may not retrieve everything — screen full names, not fragments.

75 is a reasonable default for a first pass. Below about 70 the false-positive rate rises sharply on short names, which is a real cost: every false positive is manual review time. Above 90 you are effectively screening for exact and near-exact names only and will miss transliteration variants — the failure mode that matters most for Russian, Arabic and Chinese names. Sanctions screening deliberately errs toward over-inclusion; a missed hit is a strict-liability problem, a false positive is an inconvenience.

No. The SDN index downloads to your browser once, and every comparison happens locally. No name you screen is transmitted to SanctionsAI or anyone else. Confirm it in your network panel — after the index loads there are no further requests.

The banner at the top shows the publication date of the OFAC export being screened against, read from OFAC's own publication path rather than the date the file was processed. If it is more than seven days old the banner turns into a staleness warning. OFAC can designate on any business day, so for a decision that matters, re-check against OFAC's live search.

Not on this page — it screens names. OFAC does publish digital-currency addresses for some designated parties, and wallet screening is available through the API, which also covers the lists this page does not.

This screens a list when you decide to run it and hands you a CSV. The API screens in the payment path before funds move and keeps the timestamped audit trail that evidences a compliance program — which is what matters when an examiner asks what you checked and when.