What is the OFAC SDN list?

The Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list, published by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. US persons are generally prohibited from transacting with listed individuals, entities, vessels, and crypto wallets.

How does fuzzy matching work here?

Names are normalized (case, punctuation, whitespace) and scored with token-sort similarity against every SDN primary name and alias, backed by a Postgres trigram index. Scores at or above 0.95 are strong matches; 0.85 and above are possible matches. Non-individual entities require a near-exact 0.98 for a strong verdict.

What is DOB corroboration?

When you supply a date of birth, it is compared against the DOBs OFAC publishes for the matched entity. A full match upgrades a possible match to strong; a contradiction downgrades a strong name match to possible — cutting false positives on common names.

How fresh is the data?

The SDN, alternate-names, and DOB datasets are re-downloaded from treasury.gov on a weekly refresh schedule. Each result includes the timestamp of the last successful refresh.

Free public API

OFAC SDN sanctions search

Screen any name against the US Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals list — fuzzy name matching plus date-of-birth corroboration. No signup, no API key.

Free · 30 lookups/hour SDN + aliases + DOBs Weekly Treasury refresh

same endpoint, your terminal — no key required

curl -X POST https://idcheck.now/v1/free/ofac \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Joaquin Guzman Loera", "dob": "1957-04-04"}'

# → {"confidence":"strong","score":0.98,"entity":{"name":"GUZMAN LOERA, Joaquin",
#    "type":"individual","program":"SDNTK"},"matched_name":"GUZMAN LOERA, Joaquin",
#    "name_type":"primary","dob_corroborated":true,"data_freshness":"2026-07-20T06:00:00+00:00"}

What is the SDN list?

The Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) list is published by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). It names individuals, companies, vessels, aircraft, and crypto wallets tied to sanctions programs — narcotics trafficking (SDNTK), terrorism (SDGT), proliferation, and more. US persons are generally prohibited from dealing with listed parties, and "I didn't know" is not a defense: screening customers, vendors, and payees against the SDN is a baseline compliance obligation.

How this search works

Fuzzy name matching. Your query is normalized (case, punctuation, whitespace) and scored with token-sort similarity against every SDN primary name and published alias, served from a Postgres trigram index. Scores ≥ 0.95 are strong, ≥ 0.85 are possible. Non-individual entities need a near-exact 0.98 for a strong verdict — being named like a sanctioned company shouldn't ruin your day.
DOB corroboration. Supply a birthdate and it's compared against the DOBs OFAC publishes for the matched entity. A full match upgrades possible → strong; a contradiction downgrades strong → possible.
Data freshness. SDN, alternate-name, and DOB datasets are re-downloaded from treasury.gov on a weekly refresh. Every response carries the last successful refresh timestamp.

Free tier vs. the real thing

This tool (and its backing endpoint, POST /v1/free/ofac) is free forever, rate-limited to 30 lookups per hour per IP. Production screening at idcheck.now runs the same engine on every verification — alongside wallet-address screening, decision impact mapping, and a hash-chained audit trail — inside a full KYC flow.

Disclaimer: this tool is provided for convenience and does not constitute legal advice or a complete compliance program. Always confirm potential matches against the official OFAC publications and consult counsel.

Sanctions screening inside every verification.

idcheck.now screens OFAC on every KYC check — with document forensics, face match, and liveness in the same flow. First 100 verifications free.

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