OFAC screening overview
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the US. Treasury Department. OFAC compiles a list of individuals and organizations who may present security and criminal risk to society. They do this to enforce economic and trade sanctions in the United States. Those entities are forbidden to make financial transactions in the US. The OFAC list enables financial institutions to monitor and restrict the use of their services to entities on the list. Individuals or organizations who are on the OFAC list may include terrorists, politically exposed foreign officials among other criminals.
Cross River enables and supports OFAC API calls to comply with sanction screening obligations. Partners need to meet these requirements when executing monetary transfers that include non-US countries.
Both the US and Canada administer and enforce economic and trade sanctions. They base these sanctions on foreign policy and national security goals. As such, both countries take measures against a range of targets that include:
- Foreign countries and regimes
- Terrorists
- International narcotics traffickers
- Those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
- Other threats to each country's national security, foreign policy, or economy
It is strictly prohibited to do business with countries or entities on an OFAC list. Likewise, it is forbidden to facilitate financial transactions to or from individuals, entities, or countries on these lists.
OFAC violations can result in severe civil and criminal penalties!
If a Cross River merchant partner wants to perform international transactions, they need to execute a function call to the OFAC endpoint before the transaction request.
The OFAC screening endpoints perform OFAC screening to a specific cardholder. The endpoints respond with the OFAC status to the partner.
Suppose the partner wishes to perform international transactions. The card payments gateway validates the international transaction recipient-sender pair with recent OFAC calls. That is how the gateway verifies the validity of the pair. Let’s say the cardholder was not scanned recently for a transaction or was scanned but was not validated. In that case, the gateway will reject the international transaction, providing the reason for the rejection.
See our OFAC screening API documentation . These are the function calls that let you verify OFAC compliance, get screening status, and get scan ID.

