OFAC SDN Screening API

Screen individuals and entities against the most consequential sanctions list in the world — the U.S. Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals list.

About the OFAC SDN List

The Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List) is maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a division of the United States Department of the Treasury. It is the single most referenced sanctions list in global commerce and is considered the gold standard for financial compliance screening worldwide.

The SDN List contains the names of individuals, entities, and vessels that are subject to U.S. economic sanctions. These designations are made pursuant to various sanctions programs administered by OFAC, including programs targeting terrorism, narcotics trafficking, weapons proliferation, transnational organized crime, and specific countries or regimes such as North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Syria. When a person or company is placed on the SDN List, their assets within U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from conducting any business or transactions with them.

OFAC updates the SDN List on a rolling basis, sometimes multiple times per week, as new designations, amendments, and removals are published in the Federal Register. Each entry includes identifying information such as names, aliases, dates of birth, passport numbers, and addresses. The list currently contains over 12,000 entries, though the actual number of searchable records is significantly higher due to the many aliases and alternate spellings associated with each entry.

Why SDN Screening Matters

Compliance with OFAC sanctions is not optional — it is a strict liability regime. This means that even accidental violations can result in severe civil penalties of up to $356,579 per violation (as of 2024, adjusted annually for inflation) or criminal penalties including fines up to $1,000,000 and imprisonment of up to 20 years for willful violations. Unlike many regulatory regimes, lack of knowledge or intent is not a defense against civil OFAC penalties.

Virtually every business that touches the U.S. financial system is required to screen against the SDN List. This includes banks, broker-dealers, money services businesses, insurance companies, fintech platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges, exporters, and any entity processing dollar-denominated transactions. Even non-U.S. companies can face secondary sanctions consequences for facilitating transactions involving SDN-listed parties.

Who Needs to Screen

• Banks and financial institutions conducting wire transfers or opening accounts
• Payment processors and fintech companies onboarding merchants or users
• Insurance companies underwriting policies
• Cryptocurrency exchanges and DeFi protocols
• Exporters and importers of goods and services
• Real estate companies involved in high-value transactions
• Law firms conducting conflict checks
• Any company with U.S. nexus processing international transactions

How Veridex Screens the SDN List

Veridex maintains a continuously updated mirror of the OFAC SDN list, ingesting new data within minutes of OFAC publication. Our screening engine uses phonetic matching, transliteration-aware fuzzy matching, and alias expansion to catch matches that simple string comparison would miss. Every API response includes the match score, the specific SDN entry matched, all known aliases, and the sanctions program under which the designation was made.

Sample Screening Result

Below is an example API response showing a match against a publicly known SDN entry.

// POST /v1/screen
{
  "query": "Viktor Bout",
  "lists": ["OFAC_SDN"],
  "hits": [
    {
      "list": "OFAC_SDN",
      "entity_name": "BOUT, Viktor",
      "type": "Individual",
      "score": 0.99,
      "programs": ["SDNT", "UKRAINE-EO13662"],
      "aliases": [
        "Viktor BUTT",
        "Viktor Anatoliyevich BOUT"
      ],
      "remarks": "DOB 13 Jan 1967; nationality Russia",
      "sdn_id": "10803",
      "match_basis": "exact_name"
    }
  ],
  "screened_at": "2026-04-08T12:00:00Z",
  "latency_ms": 47
}