How Sanctioni works

Sanctioni is a free pre-check for international trade. It looks at three things — the route, the goods and, if you add one, the counterparty — and explains in plain English what it found and what it did not check. This page describes exactly how. Current data: 7 official lists, 21,878 entries, last checked 7 November 2026.

1 · Sources

• UN Security Council Consolidated List
• EU Consolidated Financial Sanctions List and the EU list of designated vessels (port and services ban)
• UK Sanctions List
• Swiss SECO sanctions list
• US OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) and Consolidated (non-SDN) lists

Only official publications of the authorities are used — no commercial data, no media screening. Status, date and number of entries per list: data sources.

2 · Update and validation

• Every list is fetched from the authority every six hours (03, 09, 15, 21 UTC).
• Each download is validated — format, mandatory fields, size and a plausible amount of change — before it is used. A download that fails stays in quarantine; the previous version remains live.
• Every version is kept with its hash and date, so each result can name the list versions it was checked against.
• Changes between two versions become the latest sanctions pages and the weekly overview, written from fixed templates — no AI-written text.

3 · Counterparty matching

• Names of companies, organisations and banks are matched with an open-source matching engine (yente) that tolerates spelling variants, legal forms, transliteration (e.g. Cyrillic) and names written together or apart. A similar name leads to "review recommended", a very close name to "potential match", and a very close name confirmed by the country or an identifier to "manual review required".
• Vessels are matched by IMO number, which stays the same when a ship is renamed or reflagged. Aircraft are matched by registration.
• No individuals — by design. Natural persons are dropped when a list is imported and cannot be screened. Sanctioni is built for trade; with personal names, false matches are frequent and hurt real people, and we keep no personal data from the lists. For individuals, use the authorities' official search tools.

4 · Route and goods

• Each country on the route — origin, transit, destination and the final destination if the goods move on — is assessed separately for the UN, the EU, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Which of these regimes are shown first follows from the origin and the optional company location; the others are listed as "may also be relevant".
• Country indicators are a curated summary of published sanctions programmes (embargoes, sectoral measures, known transit and circumvention routes), with sources on every country page. They are reviewed at least quarterly. Occupied areas of Ukraine are recognised by place name.
• HS codes are compared with the EU Common High Priority items list (50 codes) and with sensitive product groups. This is an indicator, not an export-control classification.

5 · Quality checks

After every update a fixed test set runs against the live index: well-known listed names — exact, misspelt, transliterated, by IMO number and registration — must be found, and well-known unlisted companies must not raise a strong hit. A failure alerts the operator.

6 · What a result means — and what it does not cover

• A result with no indicator only means nothing was found in the checks listed with it. It is never a clearance.
• Ownership and control (for example the EU and US rules on entities owned 50 % or more by listed parties) are not resolved — a company that is not listed can still be owned or controlled by one that is.
• Not covered: individuals, national lists of other countries (for example Canada, Australia or Japan), export-control classification of dual-use goods, licences.
• Sanctioni is not legal advice. The official publication of the competent authority prevails.

Who runs it

xbx gmbh, Münchenstein, Switzerland — a company working in international freight and logistics. More: about Sanctioni · imprint.