Adverse media screening searches public news for negative information about a customer, such as fraud charges, regulatory action, or links to criminal activity. The difficulty is not finding articles. It is deciding whether an article is about the same person, whether the source is credible, and whether the matter is relevant to financial crime risk.
Judging a hit before you record it
- Confirm identity first: full name, age, location, and role must line up with the customer before the article counts.
- Weigh the source. A court record or a regulator announcement carries more weight than an anonymous blog post.
- Check the date and outcome. An old charge that ended in acquittal is different from an ongoing prosecution.
- Note relevance. A traffic offence is not financial crime risk, while a fraud conviction plainly is.
Record the link, date, and reasoning for every hit kept or discarded. A file with no reasoning is just a pile of printouts.