Find sanctions targets and persons of interest

OpenSanctions helps investigators find leads, allows companies to manage risk and enables technologists to build data-driven products.

382,244 targets · 70 data sources · updated 2023-05-31 · get bulk data

People and companies that matter

Persons of interest data provides the key that helps analysts find evidence of corruption, money laundering and other criminal activity.

Clean data and transparent process

Our open source data pipeline takes on the complex task of building a clean, de-duplicated, and well-understood dataset.

Sources with global scope

We integrate data from over sixty global sources, including official sanctions lists, data on politically exposed persons and entities of criminal interest.

Use OpenSanctions to manage business risk

OpenSanctions is free for non-commercial users. Business and commercial users must either acquire a data license to use the high-quality dataset, or they can subscribe to our pay-as-you-go API service.

Use the API License bulk data

News & updates

Updates from the OpenSanctions project, including new features, technical deep dives, and analysis.

2023-05-08: New scoring modes in the OpenSanctions API
You can now select from a range of different algorithms that score your results when you use the OpenSanctions API to screen a set of companies and people.
2023-03-06: Introducing our new Advanced Screening search
We're introducing a new advanced screening search, which lets you use multiple search criteria and fuzzy matching to identify watchlist entities.
2023-02-28: StoryWeb: Experiments in building graph data from journalistic texts
Analyze and explore the relationships between beneficial owners, sanctions and politicians with OpenScreening, powered by OpenSanctions KYB data.
2023-02-27: Expanding OpenScreening, powered by OpenSanctions KYB
Analyze and explore the relationships between beneficial owners, sanctions and politicians with OpenScreening, powered by OpenSanctions KYB data.
2022-12-07: Understanding interrelationships in the ‘Security State’ in the Middle East
Canadian data scientist and activist Wael Alalwani wants to map relationships between members of what he calls the ‘Security State’ - business elites, political actors, army generals and others.
2022-10-04: Introducing the new OpenSanctions API
As we’ve been speaking to businesses and organizations interested in OpenSanctions, we’ve seen a clear need amongst them for an easy-to-integrate, software-as-a-service API.
2022-07-19: Digging into sanctioned companies using OpenCorporates
Both OpenSanctions and OpenCorporates provide powerful data building blocks for compliance. By linking our databases up, we make it easier to track assets or assess exposure.
2022-06-16: Weaving a deeper sanctions web using data enrichment
We're adding linked data from the GLEIF company database and the ICIJ OffshoreLeaks to enrich the corporate targets in our system with relevant ownership or officership relations.
2022-06-07: Self-hosted and extensible: the OpenSanctions API
In this post, we’ll explain how you can use our open source components to build a customized sanctions and PEPs matching service - on your own premises, with your own data, with complete privacy and meeting your own requirements.
2022-04-11: Improving the way we score matching results
Our updated API uses a statistical model to determine if your query matches one of the entities in the OpenSanctions database. As we do this, we put a premium on transparency and share both the training data and scoring code.
2022-03-14: What is next for OpenSanctions?
Since its launch last September, OpenSanctions has nearly doubled its scope to 204,000 persons and entities of interest from across 43 data sources.
2022-02-25: Using graph analytics to find evidence of corruption
In cooperation with Linkurious, we worked to develop a network graph view of the OpenSanctions data and demo how it can be used in anti-corruption and money laundering investigations.
2022-02-01: How-to: Using the matching API to do KYC-style checks
Know-Your-Customer (KYC) checks are a different challenge to normal text searches: your query is supposed to describe a person or company in some detail to allow the OpenSanctions API to check if that entity (or a similar one) is flagged.
2022-01-25: We're now integrating persons of interest from Wikidata!
The structured-data edition of Wikipedia offers a compelling source of information on many persons in the public eye. Mining the data is, however, not for the faint of heart.
2022-01-18: The CIA lost track of who runs the UK, so I picked up the slack
A guest post from Tony Bowden about his efforts to build an open source dataset of world leaders inside of Wikidata, the structured-data version of Wikipedia.
2022-01-10: How to sanctions-check a spreadsheet using OpenRefine
OpenRefine, a power tool for data cleaning, offers a way to quickly check hundreds or thousands of names against the OpenSanctions database to find the ones that might be persons of interest in an investigation.
2021-12-10: Introducing business licenses for OpenSanctions
We are introducing business licenses for OpenSanctions as a way for companies using the data to support our long-term sustainability.
2021-11-14: Using ICIJ DataShare to sanctions-check a document leak
OpenSanctions is a resource for journalists to find leads in document stashes. But in order to use it, you need a tool that can help you search sanctioned entities inside your documents.
2021-11-11: How we deduplicate companies and people across data sources
One key function of OpenSanctions is to match and de-duplicate data from many sanctions lists. In this article, we discuss our approach to matching and merging list duplicates.
2021-11-03: Presentation: What is OpenSanctions?
Our colleagues at the OpenOwnership initiative gave us an opportunity to present a very quick introduction about the OpenSanctions project. Have a look at the recording!