SANCTIONS LISTS AND WATCHLISTS EXPLAINED · GUIDEUPDATED 2026-09-04
Sanctions Lists and Watchlists Explained
US Secret Service Most Wanted: 32 profiles, 27 dates of birth, Cyrillic aliases
The Secret Service most wanted list: 32 cyber and financial-crime fugitives, dates of birth on 27, nationality on all 32, Cyrillic aliases to normalise.
Of the public wanted lists we checked, the Secret Service's is the one where a date-of-birth mismatch is a documentable exclusion rather than a judgement call: 27 of its 32 profiles carry one. The United States Secret Service investigates financial and cyber crime alongside its protective mission and publishes the fugitives it is seeking. On 4 September 2026 the list held 32 profiles, almost entirely cyber-enabled financial crime: carding marketplaces, cryptocurrency laundering, business email compromise and ransomware payment infrastructure. Every profile carries a nationality and a citizenship, and most carry aliases, including Cyrillic spellings of the same name. Several carry rewards of up to ten million dollars offered jointly with the Department of State. Small list, good identifiers; for screening, that combination is worth more than a large list with none.
What this workflow covers
SCOPE- 32 profiles at secretservice.gov/investigations/mostwanted/<name> on 4 September 2026, all server-rendered and readable without a browser engine
- Identifier coverage: 27 of 32 profiles with a date of birth, 32 of 32 with nationality and citizenship, 27 of 32 with aliases, the best of any public wanted list we checked
- Aliases include Cyrillic forms next to Latin transliterations, for example a profile listing both 'Sergey Sergeevich Ivanov' and 'Сергей Сергеевич Иванов' plus criminal handles, so normalise Cyrillic before matching
- Labelled fields per profile: ALIASES, DOB, NATIONALITY, CITIZENSHIP, HEIGHT, WEIGHT, HAIR COLOR, EYE COLOR, the Secret Service field office holding the case, and a narrative case summary naming the indictment and district
- Case summaries name the US Attorney's Office, the district, the date the indictment was unsealed and the charges, which is unusually good material for judging whether a candidate match is plausible
- Rewards run to ten million dollars on the largest cases, offered in partnership with the US Department of State, and appear as a label on the listing page as well as on the profile
- Tips go by email to MostWanted@usss.dhs.gov or through a published Signal contact; there is no online submission form
- Nothing machine-readable: no bulk download, no API and no change feed, and a complete pass is roughly 33 requests, the listing plus one page per fugitive
- Outside its scope: sanctions designations, the FBI's wanted records, sealed indictments, and any of the Secret Service's protective-mission work; a person can be indicted and not appear here
- Expect false positives on Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian patronymic names that romanise several ways, on criminal handles listed as aliases that collide with unrelated business names, and on the five profiles with no date of birth
Key statistics
DATA- Profiles published, 4 September 2026
- 32
- Counted from the Secret Service most wanted listing
- Identifier coverage
- 27 of 32 with a date of birth; 32 of 32 with nationality and citizenship
- Counted from the Secret Service most wanted profile pages
- Largest published reward
- up to $10,000,000, offered with the U.S. Department of State
- U.S. Secret Service, Most Wanted Fugitives
Compliance glossary
TERMS- United States Secret Service
- A federal law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security with a dual mission: protection, and investigation of financial and cyber crime including payment fraud and cryptocurrency laundering.
- Cyrillic alias
- The original-script form of a name published alongside its Latin transliteration. Matching only the Latin form misses records where the counterparty's own documents use the Cyrillic spelling.
- Carding
- The trade in stolen payment card data through online marketplaces. It is the offence behind a large share of the profiles on this list, usually charged as conspiracy to commit bank fraud and money laundering.
- Field office
- The Secret Service office holding the case, published on each profile. It is a routing detail for law enforcement rather than a screening identifier, but it helps a reviewer trace the underlying prosecution.
- Indictment
- The formal charge returned by a grand jury. Profiles cite the district and the date the indictment was unsealed, which is the fact a reviewer can verify independently in court records.
Authoritative references
SOURCES- 01Most Wanted Fugitives
United States Secret Service
- 02Investigations — financial and cyber crime
United States Secret Service
Frequently asked questions
Q&A- What kind of fugitives are on the Secret Service most wanted list?
- People sought by the United States Secret Service in connection with its financial and cyber crime investigations. The cases are dominated by carding marketplaces, cryptocurrency laundering, business email compromise and payment infrastructure for ransomware groups, which is a narrower population than the FBI's feed and a more precisely described one.
- How many people are on it?
- 32 profiles on 4 September 2026. It is a small, curated list rather than a complete register of Secret Service fugitives, and it overlaps only partly with the FBI's wanted feed, so screen the two separately rather than treating them as one US wanted list.
- Can we exclude a Secret Service hit on date of birth?
- Mostly, yes. 27 of 32 profiles carried a date of birth on 4 September 2026, and every profile carried a nationality and citizenship, which is better identifier coverage than the FBI feed or the UK NCA list. A mismatch on date of birth against a profile that states one is a documented exclusion, not a judgement call; for the five profiles without one, record that the identifier was absent.
- Is the list free, and is there a file?
- Free, yes; a file, no. The listing and every profile page are public web pages with no registration, but there is no downloadable file, no API and no change feed, so an automated check means crawling the listing and its 32 profile pages and keeping a snapshot of what they said on the date of the check. We ingest the Secret Service list as one of the criminal-watchlist sources in our screening-data registry; the published register of criminal and wanted-person watchlists is on /coverage, and a Quick Check stores the result as a point-in-time evidence PDF.
- How often does the Secret Service list change?
- Whenever the Secret Service adds a fugitive or resolves a case. There is no published cadence and no per-record modified date on the public pages, so the practical approach is a scheduled crawl with a diff between runs. Rewards and case summaries also change as prosecutions develop, so diff the whole profile, not just the name.
- What does a Secret Service most wanted hit mean for our review?
- That someone in your data resembles a fugitive the Secret Service is seeking on financial or cyber charges. Compare the date of birth, nationality and aliases, including the Cyrillic forms, then escalate for review and record the comparison. It is a criminal-watchlist signal, not a sanction.
- Some of these people are also on the OFAC list. Is that the same thing?
- No, and the distinction matters because several of these individuals have also been designated by OFAC in separate actions. A wanted listing is a law-enforcement appeal about alleged offences; an OFAC designation is a legal restriction on dealing with the person. Screen both, and report them as separate findings.
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