What "free" actually covers, and where the line falls
Free wallet screening here is not a trial or a teaser. The expensive part of this product is the data — sanctions lists, attributed clusters, threat feeds — and that cost is the same whether one person queries it or a million do. What costs money per check is depth: every extra hop means more lookups against paid blockchain APIs. So the line falls like this. The instant check matches the address itself against the OFAC SDN list, the Tether and Circle freeze lists and the labelled corpus. The full report adds the wallet's direct counterparties, and on Ethereum it follows outgoing funds out to two or three hops, using addresses already in our cache plus a limited number of live lookups. That traversal is a lower bound: it reports the exposure it found, and a path it did not reach is not proof the path is clean. An exchange running a paid graph across every hop may still see further, which is why a clean free result and a clean exchange result are different statements.
What a free check tells you, and what it cannot
It answers the question most people actually have: is there something in this wallet's history that a compliance team will stop on. Direct sanctions contact, mixer withdrawals, stolen-funds proximity, known scam clusters among the addresses you transacted with — all of that surfaces. What it cannot tell you is whether exposure sits four hops away through intermediaries, because following that path costs per-lookup money. It also cannot tell you who controls an address, cannot promise today's clean result survives tomorrow's designation batch, and cannot predict any specific exchange's threshold, which is theirs to set. A free check removes the surprise rather than issuing a guarantee, and a tool that markets it as a guarantee is overselling what any screening can do.
Why free tools vary so much in quality
The differences are almost entirely in the data and the honesty, not the interface. A tool matching only the published OFAC list will miss the scam cluster that actually gets your deposit held, because most holds are not sanctions. A tool that merges many community feeds catches more and carries more false positives, so what matters is whether it tells you which source made each claim. The second differentiator is how a tool handles absence of evidence. Some return a confident green on a wallet they barely examined. A result should tell you what was checked, how deep it went, and how confident it is, because a clean verdict at low confidence and a clean verdict at high confidence are not the same finding and should never look identical.
Is a free check enough before an exchange deposit?
For most people, most of the time, yes — with one caveat worth stating plainly. The majority of held deposits trace to something a direct check would have caught: a P2P counterparty who paid with scam proceeds, an unsolicited inbound from a flagged address, a withdrawal from a service that was later designated. Those are direct or one hop away, and a free check finds them. The gap opens where exposure is genuinely distant, which is precisely the case where an exchange's deeper analysis sees something you cannot. The practical approach is to treat a clean free result as removing the common risks rather than proving the wallet is untouchable, and to keep source-of-funds records regardless, because documentation is what clears a hold once one happens.
Free AML check vs a first-check-free bot
Many AML bots advertise a free first check. The model is metered: one lookup costs nothing, every lookup after that costs a fee or a token, and the price usually rises with depth. That suits a business screening counterparties all day. It fits badly with how a person uses a wallet check, which is again and again: before a P2P trade, before an exchange deposit, after an unexpected inbound transfer. Plastron splits the cost the other way. The instant check on any address stays free on all 10 chains, with no sign-up. Your own wallet, proven with a signature, gets the full report as often as you want. Other people's wallets use analyses: 3 to start, and more when friends join with your link. Daily alerts on your own Ethereum or Solana wallet cost nothing. The difference shows up on the second, third and tenth check, which is exactly when a metered bot starts to cost money and when the habit of checking first actually forms.