A curated list of amazingly awesome FININT tools and resources. Financial intelligence (FININT) is the gathering of information about the financial affairs of entities of interest, to understand their nature and capabilities, and predict their intentions. Generally the term applies in the context of law enforcement and related activities.
This list is to help all of those who are into Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), threat hunting, or OSINT. From beginners to advanced.
Happy data crunching.
May your queries be fast and your leads be solvent.
Keep digging, stay liquid.
↑ Contributing
Please read CONTRIBUTING if you wish to add tools or resources. Feel free to help 🥰 us grow this list with great resources.
↑ Credits and Acknowledgments
This project is a specialized deep dive into Financial Intelligence, building upon the foundations of general OSINT research.
Source Material:
- Portions of this list were inspired by and adapted from the i-intelligence's OSINT Tools and Resources Handbook.
Global OSINT Inspiration:
- Special thanks to jivoi and spmedia for their extensive work on the Awesome OSINT list, which served as a structural reference and starting point for this financial-focused extension.
↑ Corporate and Ownership Intelligence
↑ Company Research and Registries
Corporate registries are the primary source for verifying a legal entity's existence, its registered office, current status, and official representatives. This data forms the baseline for identifying shell companies and mapping inter-corporate networks.
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Official Registries & Networks
- OpenCorporates: The largest open database of companies in the world, linking millions of records to official sources and tracking corporate histories.
- European e-Justice Portal (BRIS): A central search point for business registers across the EU, providing real-time data on over 20 million European companies.
- Corporate Registry Directory: A comprehensive directory providing direct access to over 120 domestic and international business registries.
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Specialized Identifiers & Reporting
- Research Organization Registry (ROR): A community-led registry of persistent identifiers for research organizations, essential for disambiguating entities in grants and institutional funding research.
- Corporate Register: The world's largest directory of corporate non-financial reports (ESG and CSR). Analysts use this to audit a company’s public commitments versus its actual financial flows.
↑ Beneficial Ownership
The "Ultimate Beneficial Owner" (UBO) is the natural person who ultimately exercises control over a legal entity. Identifying UBOs is critical for uncovering money laundering schemes, detecting sanctions evasion, and performing deep due diligence.
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Global Aggregators
- OpenOwnership Register: A global database linking millions of beneficial ownership records across multiple jurisdictions using a standardized data model (BODS).
- OpenScreening: A powerful collaboration between OpenOwnership and OpenSanctions that allows you to visualize links between beneficial owners and sanctioned individuals or PEPs.
- ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database: The definitive source for data from the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, and other major offshore leaks, revealing secret owners of trusts and shell companies.
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Identification & Verification
- Global LEI Index (GLEIF): Provides the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) for companies worldwide. It answers "who owns whom" by mapping direct and ultimate parent companies for entities engaged in financial transactions.
- OCCRP Aleph: A data investigative tool by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. It indexes millions of records, including corporate filings and leaked databases, to trace ownership chains.
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Methodology & Standards
- Open Ownership Data Standard (BODS): Technical documentation on how beneficial ownership data is structured, useful for developers building FININT data pipelines.
↑ Job Search Resources
Financial investigators analyze job postings to map corporate expansion, identify "key personnel" risk (such as high turnover in compliance/legal), and detect technical stacks or methodologies that a company may be trying to keep confidential.
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Global Powerhouses (Broad Reach)
- LinkedIn: The primary tool for mapping executive moves, corporate structure, and employee sentiment.
- Indeed: The largest global aggregator; excellent for tracking mass hiring in specific geographic regions.
- Glassdoor: Crucial for "inside-out" intelligence via employee reviews on management stability and salary structures.
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Niche & Technical Intelligence
- Dice: Specialized in tech; useful for uncovering a firm's software infrastructure (e.g., searching for "SWIFT specialist" or specific banking software skills).
- Xing: Essential for intelligence in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), often revealing data not found on LinkedIn.
- Remote OK / FlexJobs: Useful for identifying companies moving towards decentralized operations, which can impact jurisdictional risk.
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Aggregators & Meta-Search
- Google for Jobs: Uses AI to pull listings from thousands of smaller boards that might otherwise be missed.
- Adzuna: Provides deep labor market statistics and salary benchmarking data for economic analysis.
↑ KYC PEP and Asset Tracing
↑ People Investigations
Focused on high-net-worth individuals, professional enablers, and proxy owners (strawmen).
- LittleSis: A free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations. Excellent for mapping "crony capitalism."
- PIPL: A leading identity resolution engine to find contact information and social profiles of financial targets.
↑ PEP and Sanction Checklists
Tools to identify Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and entities subject to international financial restrictions.
- OpenSanctions: A major open-source database of persons of interest, including sanctioned entities and PEPs worldwide.
- OFAC Sanctions List Search: The official search tool for the US Department of the Treasury's sanctions list.
- EU Sanctions Map: An interactive tool providing data on all European Union sanctions regimes and listed persons.
- UN Security Council Consolidated List: Includes all individuals and entities subject to measures imposed by the UN Security Council.
↑ Vehicle and Automobile Research
Used for tracing physical assets often used as stores of value or indicators of lifestyle incongruity.
- VINAUDIT: Provides vehicle history reports based on VIN (Vehicle Identification Number).
- CarVertical: Blockchain-based vehicle history reports, useful for verifying if a high-value asset was involved in fraud or theft.
- World VIN List: A directory of VIN decoders for different manufacturers and countries.
↑ Maritime and Shipping Finance
Vessel tracking is key to investigating trade-based money laundering (TBML) and sanction-busting (STS transfers).
- MarineTraffic: The most popular AIS tracking tool for real-time ship positions and port calls.
- Equasis: A comprehensive database for ship safety and ownership information (requires free registration).
- Global Fishing Watch: Excellent for monitoring illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which is often linked to organized crime and illicit financial flows.
↑ Aviation Tracking
Corporate jets and private planes are prime assets for rapid movement of illicit capital and identifying executive travel patterns.
- ADS-B Exchange: The world's largest source of unfiltered flight data. It does not censor the tracking of private/government aircraft.
- FlightRadar24: User-friendly interface for real-time flight tracking and historical flight data.
- OpenSky Network: A non-profit association providing open access to air traffic data for research purposes.
- Icarus (C4ADS): A specialized tool for investigating aircraft ownership and flight patterns of illicit actors (often used by FININT professionals).
↑ Markets and Economic Data
↑ Economic Data and Statistics
Global macroeconomic indicators used to identify regional financial risks, inflation patterns, and trade imbalances.
- World Bank Open Data: Comprehensive platform for global development data, including GDP, debt levels, and financial inclusion statistics.
- IMF Data: International Monetary Fund’s primary source for global financial stability reports, exchange rates, and international liquidity data.
- FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data): A database of over 800,000 economic data time series from 114 sources, essential for tracking US and international financial trends.
- UN Comtrade Database: Repository of official international trade statistics; vital for detecting Trade-Based Money Laundering (TBML) through price and volume anomalies.
↑ Central Banking and Monetary Authorities
Central Banks provide the authoritative datasets for monetary policy, financial stability reports, and authorized entity registers. They are essential for verifying the legitimacy of financial institutions and accessing macro-financial raw data.
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Global Directories
- BIS - Central Bank Hub: A comprehensive directory maintained by the Bank for International Settlements, linking to all central banks worldwide.
- IMF Central Banking Directory: Technical resources and data on monetary policy frameworks.
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High-Utility Data Portals
- European Central Bank (ECB) Data Portal: Excellent for API-accessible data on the Eurozone, including exchange rates and banking statistics.
- Federal Reserve Data (FRED): While already in Economic Data, it remains the gold standard for historical financial time series.
- Banco Central do Brasil - Dados Abertos: A benchmark for Open Data in FININT, providing APIs for everything from PIX statistics to authorized financial institutions.
↑ Stock Markets and Commodities
Tools to track corporate valuation, ownership shifts in public companies, and the flow of high-value raw materials.
- Yahoo Finance: Reliable entry-points for real-time stock quotes, historical data, and financial news.
- Google Finance: Reliable entry-points for real-time stock quotes, historical data, and financial news.
- Investing.com: Wide coverage of global indices, commodities (oil, gold, grains), and economic calendars.
- TradingView: Advanced charting platform used to visualize market volatility and correlate asset price movements with geopolitical events.
- EDGAR (SEC): The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission database. Essential for deep-diving into public company filings (10-K, 10-Q) and institutional ownership (13F).
↑ Cryptocurrency and Blockchain
On-chain intelligence tools for de-anonymizing transactions, tracking "whale" movements, and identifying illicit wallet clusters.
- Blockchain.com Explorer: One of the most used explorers for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash transactions.
- Etherscan: The definitive tool for investigating the Ethereum ecosystem, including Smart Contracts, ERC-20 tokens, and NFT ownership.
- Whale Alert: Tracks and reports large transactions as they happen, often signaling major market shifts or the movement of hacked funds.
- WalletExplorer: A specialized Bitcoin block explorer that attempts to cluster addresses belonging to the same entity (e.g., exchanges, mixers, or marketplaces).
- Chainabuse: A community-led platform to report and search for crypto scams, malicious addresses, and fraudulent schemes.
↑ Financial Crime and Threat Intel
↑ Data Breach and Leak Search
Identifying leaked financial credentials, credit card dumps, and internal corporate documents exposed in breaches.
- Have I Been Pwned: The standard for checking if an email or phone number has been compromised in known data breaches.
- DeHashed: A powerful asset for investigators to search through cracked databases for compromised accounts and linked identities (subscription required).
- Intelligence X (IntelX): A search engine and data archive that indexes the darknet, document leaks, and web history. Excellent for finding "deleted" financial leaks.
- Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets): A repository of leaked datasets from financial institutions, governments, and corporate entities, focusing on transparency and public interest.
↑ Dark Web Search Engines
Deep web indexing focused on illicit marketplaces, carding forums, and money laundering services.
- Ahmia: A reliable index of Tor onion services that filters out "child abuse" content, making it safer for professional research.
- Aleph Open Search: A specialized search engine for the deep web that helps investigators find mentions of entities or wallet addresses in hidden forums.
- Torch: One of the oldest search engines on the Tor network (requires Tor Browser).
↑ Financial Threat Intelligence
Monitoring cyber-attacks targeting the financial sector, such as banking trojans, ATM malware, and SWIFT fraud.
- Malware Patrol: Provides specialized feeds for banking malware and ransomware, often used to protect financial infrastructure.
- Any.Run: An interactive malware analysis sandbox. Useful for analyzing suspicious attachments or links in "phishing" emails targeting bank employees.
- Bad Packets: Real-time monitoring of botnets and cyber threats that may be targeting specific financial IPs.
- The Paypers: While news-focused, it provides excellent intelligence on global payment fraud trends and digital identity theft.
↑ Money Laundering and AML Resources
Researching the typologies and legal frameworks used to combat illicit financial flows.
- FATF-GAFI: The Financial Action Task Force. Their "Mutual Evaluation Reports" and "High-Risk Jurisdictions" (Grey/Black lists) are essential for country-risk assessment.
- Basel AML Index: An independent annual ranking that assesses the money laundering and terrorist financing risks around the world.
- Egmont Group: A global organization of Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). Their resources provide insights into international information exchange on money laundering.
- ACAMS MoneyLaundering.com: The news arm of the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists; a prime source for enforcement actions and new AML regulations.
↑ Data Mining and Analysis Tools
↑ Financial Data Visualization
Transforming raw transaction logs and corporate links into visual maps to identify money laundering patterns and shell company clusters.
- Maltego: The industry standard for link analysis. It has specific "transforms" for Bitcoin, companies, and social media to visualize complex networks.
- Gephi: An open-source visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Excellent for large financial datasets.
- Graphistry: A cloud-based platform that uses GPU acceleration to visualize massive amounts of financial data, making it easier to spot "needles in the haystack."
- Linkurious: A powerful tool often used by investigative journalists (like the ICIJ) to explore and visualize complex connections in neo4j databases.
↑ Code and File Search
Searching for leaked API keys, hardcoded banking credentials, or financial algorithms hidden in public repositories.
- GitHub Search: The go-to for finding leaked credentials, configuration files, and proprietary financial scripts.
- PublicWWW: A "source code search engine" that allows you to find specific snippets of HTML, JS, or CSS. Useful for identifying all websites owned by the same fraudulent entity via tracking IDs.
- Sourcegraph: A robust tool for searching across millions of open-source repositories with advanced regex capabilities.
- Grep.app: A lightning-fast tool to search across half a million git repos, perfect for finding specific financial strings or wallet addresses.
↑ Document and Slides Search
Mining annual reports (10-K), investor presentations, and white papers for hidden financial insights.
- SlideShare: Often used by executives for presentations that might contain sensitive internal structure or roadmap data not found in official filings.
- Scribd: A massive library of documents where one can often find leaked court transcripts, corporate memos, and internal bank training manuals.
- FilePursuit: A powerful file search engine to find PDF, XLS, and DOC files on the open web, essential for finding forgotten financial spreadsheets.
- PDF Search Engine: Specialized in locating PDF documents, ideal for hunting for "Consolidated Financial Statements."
↑ Web History and Capture
Preserving evidence of fraudulent websites, scam exchanges, or "boiler rooms" before they are taken down.
- Wayback Machine (Archive.org): The internet's digital library. Essential for seeing how a financial company's website looked before a scam was exposed.
- Archive.today: A web archiving tool that takes a "snapshot" of a page. Unlike Wayback, it is excellent for capturing pages that might block bots or have heavy Javascript.
- Hunchly: A professional tool for OSINT investigators that automatically captures and organizes every page you visit during an investigation.
- CachedView: A single interface to search through Google Cache, Bing Cache, and the Wayback Machine simultaneously.
↑ Learning and Community
↑ Academic Resources and Grey Literature
Papers, white papers, and research on illicit financial flows and anti-corruption.
- SSRN (Social Science Research Network): Search for "Money Laundering" or "Tax Evasion" to find high-quality academic papers on financial crime.
- Global Financial Integrity (GFI): Essential reports on trade-based money laundering, corruption, and illicit financial flows.
- TRAC (The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse): Data-heavy research on federal law enforcement, including financial crimes and IRS audits.
- The Sentry: Investigative reports focusing on the link between dirty money and war crimes, perfect for deep asset tracing case studies.
↑ FININT Blogs and News
Specialized outlets for financial intelligence updates and enforcement actions.
- OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project): The gold standard for financial investigation stories and methodology.
- FinCEN Newsroom: Official updates from the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
- Kyc360: A leading platform for AML/KYC news, insights, and financial crime analysis.
- Naked Capitalism: Provides deep (and often cynical) analysis of finance, banking, and legal/ethical failures in the financial system.
↑ Other Resources
Curated OSINT foundations that support financial inquiries.
- Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit: A massive spreadsheet of general OSINT tools, including a section on financial and corporate tracking.
- OSINT Framework: A visual directory of OSINT tools; focus on the "Business Records" and "Digital Currency" branches.
- Journalist's Toolbox - Business & Economics: Specialized resources for researching companies and financial data.
- OSINT Updates Newsletter: A weekly digest that often includes new tools for corporate and crypto tracking.
↑ Related Awesome Lists
Lists that complement the FININT discipline.
- awesome-threat-intelligence: Focus on indicators of compromise, including banking trojans.
- awesome-blockchain: Technical resources for understanding the underlying tech of digital assets.
- awesome-privacy: Essential for OpSec (Operational Security) when conducting financial investigations.
- awesome-forensics: Tools for digital evidence, useful when analyzing financial documents and devices.
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