Sanctions Screening

Sanctions screening is the process by which a regulated exchange checks new customers, and often individual transactions, against government-maintained sanctions lists — for example lists of individuals, companies, or countries barred from accessing the financial system for national-security or foreign-policy reasons. Most countries maintain their own sanctions lists, and a globally operating exchange typically has to screen against several of them at once.

For an ordinary user, sanctions screening mostly shows up as account restrictions tied to your country of residence or citizenship — some exchanges block users from specific countries entirely rather than screening case by case, since the compliance cost of screening every individual transaction against every relevant list can be higher than simply not serving a given market.