Sanctions data reaches beyond the listed name, into the domains where the connections behind a designation live.
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Sanctions data reaches beyond the listed name, into the domains where the connections behind a designation live.
A sanctions or watchlist designation is rarely just a name. The person named controls companies, holds political office, owns vessels, or issues tradeable securities — and the risk follows those connections outward. To screen effectively, you have to reach into the domains where those connections live: corporate registries, maritime registries, securities identifiers, and records of who holds political power.
OpenSanctions models each of these as first-class data rather than free text, so a match can resolve to the ship, the shareholding, or the office behind a name. The core dataset draws sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEPs), debarment lists used in government procurement, lists of known terrorists, and other entities of interest from hundreds of sources into a single, deduplicated dataset; what goes into it is governed by our data inclusion criteria, and every entity is tagged with risk topics that record why it is there. These pages describe the specialized coverage we build around it.
While sanctions have traditionally targeted persons and companies, an increasing number of authorities has now started to name cryptocurrency wallets as targets on their lists. These include the US OFAC, Israel's NBCTF, the Japanese MoF, and Britain's HMT/OFSI.
Using the OpenSanctions data model, you can screen individual wallet addresses and, when the source sanctions list names them, see the person or company that holds a wallet. Wallets are modelled with the CryptoWallet schema.
"Adverse media" (also called "negative news") screening checks regulatory publications, news reports, social media, and press releases for unfavourable mentions of a customer or counterparty. Many regulators expect financial services companies to do it.
We include adverse information from a broad set of non-sanctions watchlists, such as regulatory lists and debarment databases. We do not include a comprehensive archive of news reports, social media postings, or press releases: Aggregating such content as a cleaned-up bulk data bundle would infringe the copyright of content publishers; it would also be a significant technical undertaking that calls for a different skill set than the detailed data cleansing OpenSanctions specializes in.
If you are looking for an adverse media provider, your choice would depend on several factors, so our guidance is limited. Since OpenSanctions focuses on technical building blocks, here are two news aggregator APIs that take a similar approach: