OFAC Sanctions Screening: UN, EU, UK Lists + LEI & EU VAT Check on the Apify Store →

How to screen suppliers for sanctions with OFAC Sanctions Screening: UN, EU, UK Lists + LEI & EU VAT Check

Tutorial article for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium and Hashnode. The owner publishes it and records the URL in brief.json → marketing.links.

The problem

An exporter about to send a pro-forma invoice, or a marketplace about to approve a new seller, has to know whether the other side is on a sanctions or export-control list. Done by hand that means four websites: the OFAC Sanctions List Search, the trade.gov Consolidated Screening List, the GLEIF LEI search and the EU VIES VAT check — one name at a time. Every namesake has to be opened and compared by country, address and registration number, and the result written into the file. For a book of 100 trade partners that is about five hours, and it is out of date the week the lists change.

Step by step

  1. Open the Actor on the Apify Store and click Try it. The form opens on a free demo of three labelled sample companies — one clear, one review, one block — so you see the output before you type anything.
  2. In Counterparties to check, paste your partners one per line, the name then the two-letter country: Rosneft Oil Company, RU, Tata Steel Limited, IN, Google Ireland Limited, IE. Keep AI hit adjudication on.
  3. Press Start. The Actor downloads the six official lists once (OFAC SDN and non-SDN, the US Consolidated Screening List with the BIS Entity List, the UN, EU and UK lists), looks each company up in GLEIF and VIES, and weighs every possible hit against the company's own facts. Ten real companies took 42 seconds in our local test run.
  4. Open the Shortlist view: blocks first, each with the list, the entry, the programme and the deciding fields. The Legal entity & VAT view shows the GLEIF record, both parents and the VIES answer.
  5. Export to CSV, Excel or Google Sheets — or wire a webhook and upsert on dedupeKey.

What a run costs

The first 25 counterparty checks are free. After that, a company screened by the rules costs $0.0039; one whose open hits the AI reads costs $0.0097, plus about $0.003 of model tokens on Apify's model access. In our 10-company test run, 8 companies needed the AI: 8 × $0.0097 + 2 × $0.0039 + about $0.026 of tokens is about $0.11 — $0.011 per company. Duplicates, unchanged re-screens and clears below your minimum score are never charged, and blocks and reviews are always delivered.

Automate it

Type a Re-screen memory name (for example suppliers-weekly) and your e-mail address, then open the task the run saved and click Schedule — weekly. From the second run on, only companies whose result changed are delivered and charged, and the digest lands in your inbox. From code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/counterparty-check-ai").call(run_input={
    "counterparties": ["Rosneft Oil Company, RU", "Tata Steel Limited, IN"],
    "enableAi": True, "rescreenStoreName": "suppliers-weekly", "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,
})
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(row["name"], row["verdict"], row["verdictReason"])

Screening support from official lists, not legal advice — a block or review still needs a human decision.

OFAC Sanctions Screening: UN, EU, UK Lists + LEI & EU VAT Check on the Apify Store →