The Screening Guarantee

If we tell you a counterparty is clean and it was on the OFAC SDN list at that moment, we cover the first $10,000 of your legal fees. Here is exactly what that means, so you can decide whether it is worth anything to you.

What is covered

A false negative on sanctions data: our API returned clean: true (or an empty matches array) for a name, wallet, or country that was present on the US Treasury OFAC SDN list at the screened_at timestamp on our response, and you were subsequently charged legal fees arising from a payment to that counterparty.

We contribute up to US$10,000 toward those legal fees, capped at $10,000 per customer in aggregate.

What is not covered

  • The free tier and self-hosted deployments. The guarantee applies to paid plans (Dev and Pro) only. We cannot stand behind a copy of the code running on your own machine.
  • Payments you made without calling us, or after we returned clean: false, or while our API was erroring and your code failed open. Pattern 2 in the playbook exists for this reason.
  • Listings added after we answered. A screening result is a statement about the SDN snapshot named in list_version, at the screened_at time. If OFAC adds an address at 14:00 and we answered at 13:00, we answered correctly.
  • Fines and penalties themselves, settlements, disgorgement, or business losses. This is a contribution toward legal fees, not insurance against an OFAC penalty. Nobody should read it as a substitute for a compliance program or for legal advice.
  • Non-sanctions outputs: risk_score, kya_verify and dispute_open are advisory signals, not list membership, and are not covered.

How to claim

  1. Email hello@sanctionsai.dev within 90 days of the legal fees being incurred.
  2. Include the stored API response — the full JSON body, including the screened_at, screen_id and list_version fields every screen returns — for the screen in question. This is why pattern 6 tells you to keep the receipt; without it there is nothing to verify against.
  3. Include the invoice for the legal fees.
  4. We check the response against the SDN list history for that timestamp and reply within 30 days.

Why we put a number on it

Because a screening API that carries no consequence for being wrong is asking you to take all of the risk of trusting it. $10,000 is a real amount for a business this size — large enough that we have to take the data seriously, small enough that we can actually pay it. We would rather publish a limit we can honour than a bigger number we could not.

This guarantee is part of our Terms of Service (section 5a), which carve it out of the general limitation of liability. It is not legal advice and does not change your own obligations under sanctions law.

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