A SAR — suspicious activity report — is the filing a regulated firm makes to its national financial intelligence unit when it has grounds to suspect that funds relate to crime. In some jurisdictions the same filing is called an STR, a suspicious transaction report. The obligation is triggered by suspicion that survives a review, not by an alert on its own, and in most regimes the customer must not be told the report was made.
A screening result does not file anything and does not decide anything. What it does is give a reviewer something concrete to reason from: a named connection, a named counterparty, a date. Suspicion built on that is a position a firm can hold; suspicion built on a feeling is a position that falls apart the first time it is questioned.
The reporting decision is also where a weak record becomes expensive. Supervisors ask what you knew and when. A queue of dated alerts with written outcomes answers that question. An inbox does not.
Two failures cost firms most here, and they pull in opposite directions. Filing on every alert to be safe buries the financial intelligence unit in noise and tells a supervisor that nobody at your firm is actually reviewing anything. Filing on none because a review was never finished is worse, and it is the one that shows up in enforcement notices.
The workspace keeps the case: the verdict, the drivers in plain words, the entity name where the counterparty is attributed, the network, the timestamps, the reviewer who looked and what they concluded. The signed report is exportable, which matters when an internal file has to be assembled from several checks made weeks apart.
None of that is a filing, and no screening tool should present itself as one. The report is your firm's statement to its regulator, made under your own procedures.
No. An alert is a prompt to look at something. A SAR is a formal report to an authority, made only after a review concludes that suspicion is justified under your local rules.
Your national financial intelligence unit. Turkey's is MASAK ([MASAK](https://masak.hmb.gov.tr/)), Spain's is SEPBLAC ([SEPBLAC](https://www.sepblac.es/en/)); every country has one, with its own forms and deadlines.
Largely naming. Some regimes call it a suspicious activity report, others a suspicious transaction report, and the trigger and content are set by local law in both cases.
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Generally no. Tipping off is an offence in most regimes, and that extends to hints — sudden unexplained account changes can be read as disclosure by conduct.
Send any wallet to the Telegram bot and get a verdict in seconds. Three checks a day, free, no signup. Desks that screen every deposit run it on plans from $199/mo.