About

The editorial constraint, stated plainly

Every page on this site is written from the detection side. The frame is always: here is what investigators, regulators, banks and journalists look for, here is how these schemes were uncovered, and here is the enforcement record.

That constraint produces four concrete rules, and they are enforced at build time where they can be:

• No operational instruction. No guidance on structuring an entity, no jurisdiction shopping, no thresholds framed as things to stay under, nothing about defeating screening. Where a passage reads like a playbook rather than a post-mortem, it is rewritten.
• A ceiling on mechanical detail. Mechanics are described at the level a published FATF typology report, an OFAC advisory, a UN Panel of Experts report or a court filing describes them — and every mechanical claim cites one of those.
• Every technique page ends on detection and enforcement. Red-flag indicators, each attributed to the document it comes from; how the method is caught; what the documented outcomes were.
• Every red flag carries a working link to its source. The build fails if an indicator has no source URL, and every external URL on the site is checked before deploy, including for soft 404s where an agency quietly redirects a retired document to its homepage.

What this site is not

It is not a blog, not a news site, and not a compliance vendor's content marketing. There is nothing to buy here and no product behind it. It is supported by advertising — see the privacy page for exactly what that means — but no advertiser sees a page before it publishes, chooses what is written, or is told which page you are reading. Ad placement and editorial judgement are unrelated processes, and no page here has ever been written, softened or delayed to suit a category of advertiser.

It is also not a screening tool. Nothing here should be used to decide whether a real counterparty is sanctioned. The lists themselves are published by the authorities and the list pages explain where each one lives; use those.

The scope boundary on vessels

There is no vessel-level content on this site: no per-ship pages, no IMO lookup, no fleet lists, no vessel search. Maritime techniques are explained here as techniques. Wherever a specific vessel, registry or fleet would be named, the page links out to Sanctioned Vessels, which holds the vessel-level reference data.

This is a deliberate division rather than an omission. Vessel data has to be maintained ship-by-ship and dated to be worth anything, and mixing it into an explanatory reference would make both worse.

On naming people and companies

This site names parties only where they already appear in published enforcement records, court filings or official reports, and it describes their conduct as those documents describe it. It does not assemble profiles of individuals who are not already named in the public record, and it does not use leaked corporate data to identify anyone who is not.

The jurisdiction pages carry an explicit note to the same effect: they describe why a country recurs in published records, which is usually a matter of trade volume and connectivity, and they are not assessments of countries, governments or businesses.

How corrections work

Corrections are made on the page and the review date is updated. Where a correction is material, it is noted on the page. Anything factual, with a source, will be corrected — please send it.

Every page carries a reviewed date rather than a publish date, because the technique pages are meant to be long-lived and a fake publish date would be worse than useless.

Common questions

Who is this site for?

Journalists, students, researchers, compliance staff early in their careers, and anyone who has encountered a term like "front company" or "trade misinvoicing" in the news and wants a real answer rather than a vendor brochure.

Does this site tell people how to evade sanctions?

No. Mechanics are described only at the level published in official advisories, FATF typology reports, UN Panel of Experts reports and court filings, and every technique page ends on how the method is detected and what happened to the people who used it. Anything that reads as instruction rather than post-mortem is rewritten.

Is this legal or compliance advice?

No. It is educational reference material. Sanctions obligations depend on your jurisdiction, your counterparties and the specific transaction, and nothing here is a substitute for advice on those facts.

How are corrections handled?

Corrections are made on the page, the review date is updated, and where the correction is material the change is noted on the page itself. Anything factual with a source will be corrected.

Sources and licence

Every dataset used here is listed on the sources page with its publisher, licence, update cadence and last fetch date, generated from the ingest scripts' own metadata so it cannot go stale silently. This site's text is licensed CC BY 4.0; the documents it cites remain the property of their publishers.