About & methodology

Data source & freshness

Data comes directly from the issuing authorities — OFAC's Sanctions List Service, the EU Consolidated Financial Sanctions List, the UN Security Council Consolidated List, the UK OFSI Consolidated List, and the U.S. export-control lists (BIS Entity, Denied Persons, Unverified and Military End-User lists; State Department ITAR Debarred and nonproliferation measures) via the Consolidated Screening List (all government, public domain). The full dataset is rebuilt automatically every day and versioned to OFAC's publication id. Always confirm a hit against the issuing authority's own list before acting.

Recent OFAC publications (snapshot version marker)

How matching works

Every query is compared against each entity's primary name and every alias, plus its structured identifiers. Names are normalized (case, accents, corporate suffixes) and scored by an ensemble — the best signal across all of these wins:

• Jaro-Winkler — typo and prefix similarity.
• Damerau-Levenshtein — edit distance that counts adjacent letter swaps as one edit.
• Sørensen-Dice & trigram Jaccard — character n-gram overlap, robust to insertions and reordering.
• Metaphone phonetic — collapses sound-alike spellings (Mohammed / Muhammad, Smith / Smyth, Philip / Filip).
• Transliteration folding — links romanization variants (Kadyrov / Kadirov).
• Acronym & initials — “CML” ↔ Caspian Maritime Logistics; “J.” ↔ John.
• IDF term weighting — a match on a rare, distinctive surname counts far more than one on a common word like “Company” or “Mohammed”.
• Multilingual legal-form handling — company and legal-form descriptors are recognised across languages (GmbH, OOO, ТОВ, Kompaniya, Sh.p.k., Sdn Bhd …) so the same entity matches whichever form its name is written in.
• Homoglyph defence — Cyrillic look-alike characters are folded to their Latin twins, so a disguised “Gazprоm” screens identically to “Gazprom”.

Tokens are assigned one-to-one and order-independently, so “Mohammed Ali” matches “Ali Ali Mohammed”. Optional year-of-birth and country inputs act as corroboration modifiers — raising a hit they confirm, lowering one they contradict. Each result shows exactly which tokens matched and by which method.

Identifiers & ownership

Beyond names, an exact match on a passport, national / tax / registration id, IMO, MMSI, call sign, aircraft tail, or digital-currency address is flagged directly. Relationship data drives an ownership graph implementing OFAC's 50 Percent Rule: entities owned 50%+ by a blocked party are themselves blocked even when unlisted — the network view traces those chains.

Any hit with relationships opens in two views. Radial rings every listed relationship by hop distance. Hierarchy stacks the same data — principals above, subordinates below — so a chain reads top-down, whether it is an ownership chain or a support chain. Direction is resolved per relationship type: OFAC phrases a relationship outward from the listed party (“Providing support to”, “Owned or Controlled By”), so the named party is the principal and sits above, while types phrased the other way (“Owns, controls, or operates”) sit below and symmetric ones (family, association) sit level. Position shows who is superior; the arrowhead points at the party named in the relationship, which is not always the one below. Only ownership links drive the 50 Percent Rule, so they are drawn solid red and counted separately from support, agency, office and family links.

Coverage

Issuing authorities

Limitations

• A hit is a lead to verify, not a determination; absence of a hit is not a clearance.
• Covers the OFAC, EU, UN and UK OFSI financial-sanctions lists and the U.S. BIS / State Department export-control lists — not every national regime, and not the EU dual-use list. The 50% Rule ownership graph is OFAC-specific.
• The snapshot may lag an authority by up to a day. Confirm anything material against the issuing authority directly.
• Regimes differ: an OFAC blocking designation, an EU or UN asset freeze, a UK OFSI designation and a BIS/State export-control listing carry entirely different legal obligations — an export-control listing means a licence requirement or loss of export privileges, not an asset freeze. Each result states its authority and the operative restriction; never carry OFAC doctrine across to another regime.
• Queries are processed in memory and never stored or logged.