Sanctionfy Is Back

Sanctionfy went quiet for three years. It is coming back, but not in the same form.

The original blog was a typical solo-practitioner side project: occasional posts on OFAC enforcement, a few BSA/AML observations, the kind of writing that competes with a hundred other compliance blogs by being slightly faster or slightly more readable than the law firm marketing posts. That is not what the world needs more of.

The relaunched Sanctionfy has a different premise.

The premise

Most of the existing compliance blogs hedge to the point of uselessness — they sound like the lawyer is afraid of being quoted. Vendor blogs are sales funnels in disguise. The good practitioner content lives in private channels: group chats, Slack workspaces, the back-channel emails between compliance officers comparing notes on the same OFAC FAQ.

Sanctionfy aims to publish that practitioner-grade content out in the open, clearly labeled as opinion where it is opinion, and grounded in the actual text of the regulations and guidance where it is analysis. It will have points of view. It will be wrong sometimes. The corrections will be public.

And every substantive post will ship with something operational — a checklist, a decision flow, a downloadable template, or an interactive tool. The wedge is that the same person doing the legal analysis is also doing the engineering.

What is coming

The next eight weeks will see:

• A flagship piece on voluntary self-disclosure versus mandatory reporting under 31 CFR §§ 501.603 and 501.604 — the most-confused intersection in OFAC compliance practice.
• An OFAC 50% Rule Helper that walks through aggregate ownership analysis with a structured reasoning trace.
• A primer on dual-use goods triage for trade finance teams, paired with a helper tool to assist initial classification before the export controls desk gets involved.
• A weekly This Week in OFAC roundup.
• A BSA/AML Program Health Check for fintechs and small banks.

Everything will be free. The tools will run in your browser; nothing sensitive leaves your machine. There is no signup wall on content. There may eventually be a premium tier for power-user features, but the substantive analysis stays open.

A note on the archive

Posts from before the relaunch are preserved on the site under an Archive section. They are dated and clearly marked. Sanctions and AML rules change frequently — verify current guidance before relying on archived analysis.

How to follow along

Subscribe to the newsletter for a weekly digest. The RSS feed is live. Or follow on LinkedIn — that is where most of the day-to-day commentary will land.

If you have a topic you want covered, a tool you wish existed, or a correction to anything published here — please send it. Sanctionfy is built for the people who actually do the work, and that includes you.

— Anant