Sanctions Evasion Reference

Screening

Automated comparison of names, identifiers and other transaction data against sanctions lists and internal watchlists, at onboarding and on each payment.

reviewed

2026-08-20

Screening is the operational core of sanctions compliance and it is a string-matching problem before it is anything else. Lists carry names in multiple transliterations; customers supply names with spelling variants, honorifics and word order differences.

Systems therefore use fuzzy matching with tunable thresholds, and the tuning is a genuine trade-off: too loose and the alerts are unworkable, too tight and a transliteration variant passes. Enforcement actions turning on a missed match usually turn on that setting.

Where this term is used

  • How is correspondent banking used to evade sanctions? — Using a chain of banks that each know only their own customer, so that a payment for a restricted party reaches a currency it could not access directly, without any bank in the chain seeing the whole transaction.
  • What is a front company? — A front company is a business that trades normally but exists largely to hide another party's involvement in its transactions. The real activity is the cover; the concealed party is the point.
  • How is cryptocurrency used to evade sanctions? — Settling obligations in virtual assets so that value moves without a correspondent bank, a payment message or a screening system in the path, and without any institution able to block it in transit.
  • What are nominee directors and nominee shareholders? — A nominee is formally recorded as a company's director or shareholder but acts on an undisclosed party's instructions. The register names the nominee; the decisions belong to someone else.
  • What is stablecoin settlement and why does it matter for sanctions? — Settling commercial obligations in a fiat-referenced token, so that a dollar-denominated trade can be paid without a dollar ever passing through a correspondent bank.

Related terms

  • Fuzzy matching — Name-matching that tolerates spelling, transliteration and word-order variation, scoring similarity rather than requiring an exact match.
  • Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List — The principal United States sanctions list. Property of anyone on it is blocked and US persons are generally prohibited from dealing with them.
  • Designation — The formal act of adding a person, entity, vessel or aircraft to a sanctions list, which triggers the restrictions attached to that programme.
  • Wire stripping — Removing or altering originator, beneficiary or reference information from a payment message so that screening at an intermediary bank does not identify a restricted party.

Sources

  1. Frequently Asked Questions. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, 2026.
  2. Consolidated Screening List. U.S. International Trade Administration, 2026.

All glossary terms