OFAC Sanctions Screening for Developers: How to Check Addresses and Names

OFAC Sanctions Screening for Developers: How to Check Addresses and Names

When developing KYC/AML compliance systems, one of the critical steps is ensuring that your users or transactions are not associated with individuals listed on the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. The SDN list contains entities and individuals designated under various sanctions programs. These include terrorist organizations, narcotics traffickers, weapons proliferators, and others.

Problem

Checking these entries can be time-consuming and error-prone due to the sheer number of names and wallet addresses against the OFAC SDN list, which currently has over 18,706 entries. Manually checking each address or name would not only be impractical but also inefficient for large-scale applications.

Solution: Python Code Example

Here's a simple example in Python to demonstrate how you can query the API endpoint provided by api.verilexdata.com to check if an address or name is on the OFAC SDN list. This code uses the requests library to make HTTP requests and parse JSON responses.

python
import requests

def check_sanction(address_or_name):
    url = f"https://api.verilexdata.com/api/v1/sanctions/stats?query={address_or_name}"
    response = requests.get