OFAC Screening Engine Glossary Part 1
Core terms for the software that matches names and addresses against OFAC sanctions lists in real time.
TL;DR
TL;DR: A screening engine is software that compares a counterparty's name or wallet address against OFAC lists and returns a match or no-match. The best engines balance catching real matches against limiting false positives.
What a screening engine is
A screening engine ingests sanctions data, such as the SDN List and OFAC's published crypto wallet addresses, then checks each incoming counterparty against that data. It handles normalization, transliteration, and fuzzy matching so that a name spelled slightly differently from a listed entry can still be caught. Two failure modes matter most: a false negative misses a real blocked party, while a false positive blocks a legitimate transaction. OFAC's strict liability makes the false negative the more dangerous error.
Why it matters for agent payments
Agents need a screening engine that runs inside the payment flow, not as an offline batch job. sanctionsai.dev provides a screening engine as an API: one HTTP call, under 100 ms, with clean equals ALLOW and flagged equals BLOCK. Its live data covers 947 OFAC-listed crypto wallets and 19,218 SDN names, synced hourly so the engine never screens against a stale list.
Terms covered in Part 1
- Match: a counterparty that corresponds to a listed entry.
- False negative: a missed match, the more serious error.
- Normalization: cleaning a name or address before comparison.