How to Screen a Customer List Against OFAC, UN and UK Sanctions Lists

You can check a whole customer or supplier list against the official US, UN and UK sanctions lists in a few minutes, for about $3 per 1,000 names, without a compliance platform contract.

If you take payments, ship goods abroad or onboard business customers, you are expected not to deal with sanctioned people or companies. Large banks run dedicated screening systems. Small exporters, marketplaces, fintech startups and agencies usually make do with a manual search on a government website, one name at a time, or skip it entirely. This guide shows a middle path: bulk screening against the official lists, with a result you can keep as an audit trail.

The lists that matter

Three publishers cover most of what small and mid-sized businesses are asked about. Together they hold roughly 27,000 entries and tens of thousands of alternative names.

• Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) (US Treasury, OFAC): people, companies, vessels and aircraft under US sanctions programmes.
• Consolidated (non-SDN) lists (US Treasury, OFAC): sectoral and other targeted lists outside the SDN list.
• UN Security Council Consolidated List (United Nations): individuals and entities under UN Security Council sanctions.
• UK Sanctions List (UK Government): designations under UK sanctions regimes.

All four are free to download, and they change often, sometimes several times a week. A copy saved last quarter is already out of date.

Why an exact-match search misses people

Names on sanctions lists rarely appear the way they are typed into a sign-up form, so a plain text search gives false comfort.

• Word order: the SDN list writes "PUTIN, Vladimir Vladimirovich"; your customer list says "Vladimir Putin".
• Transliteration and accents: Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese names have several valid Latin spellings.
• Aliases: many entries carry a dozen or more alternative names, and the match is often on an alias, not the primary name.
• Company suffixes: "Rosneft", "Rosneft PJSC" and "OAO Rosneft" should all be treated as the same name.

Fuzzy matching handles this by normalising both names (case, accents, punctuation, word order, suffixes) and scoring how similar they are from 0 to 100. You then review anything above a threshold you choose.

Screen a list in five steps

The walkthrough below uses Sanctions Screening: OFAC, UN & UK Lists Name Check on Apify, which downloads all four lists fresh from the government sources on every run. A free Apify account is enough to start.

1. Open the tool page and click Try for free.
2. Paste your names into Names to screen, one per line. Export them from your CRM or spreadsheet first; up to 100,000 fit in one run.
3. Leave Match threshold at 85 to start. Lower it to catch more spelling variants, raise it to cut false positives.
4. Click Start. A list of a few thousand names finishes in well under a minute.
5. Open the Output tab and filter by status.

Each name comes back as one of three statuses:

• Clear (below the threshold): no action; keep the record.
• Potential match (threshold to 94): compare date of birth, nationality and address against the official record.
• Match (95 or more): hold the transaction and review before going further.

Every match lists the matched name or alias, the list it came from, the sanctions programmes, date of birth, nationality and a link to the official record, so the review takes minutes. Download the results as CSV or Excel and file them; the checkedAt time on each row is your record of when the check happened.

Make it automatic

A one-off check is a start; the lists change weekly, so the real protection comes from screening at onboarding and re-screening on a schedule.

• At sign-up: call the tool from your onboarding flow and get the result back in the same request.
• Monthly re-screen: schedule a run in Apify with your full customer list, and get an email or Slack alert when anything comes back as a potential match.
• No-code: connect it to Make, Zapier or n8n, for example to screen every new row added to a Google Sheet.

The API call takes one request (replace YOUR_API_TOKEN with the token from Apify Console > Settings > API & Integrations):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plotpointtech~sanctions-screening/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"names": ["Example Trading LLC"], "threshold": 88}'

Good practice and limits

A name match is an alert to review, never proof that someone is sanctioned: many people share names, and the decision rests on the other identifiers.

• Review every potential match against date of birth, nationality and address on the official record before acting.
• Keep the output of each run as your record of what was checked and when.
• Know what is not covered: the EU consolidated list, other national lists, politically exposed persons (PEPs) and adverse media need other sources.
• This is not legal advice. Screening supports your compliance process; your obligations depend on your country, industry and customers, so check them with a qualified adviser.

For most small businesses, a bulk check at onboarding plus a monthly re-screen against the four official lists is a large step up from a manual search, at a cost of a few dollars a month.

Plot Point Technologies builds the Sanctions Screening tool on Apify. Questions: [e-mail].