What is OCCRP Aleph?
OCCRP Aleph, now called Aleph Pro, is the investigative data platform run by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative reporters. It brings together current and historic databases, documents and leaks, including company registries, court archives, gazettes, land registries, procurement records, sanctions lists and air and maritime registers. OCCRP says it fetches public records from more than 230 online sources and runs more than 200 scrapers to keep official datasets up to date.
Anyone can search the public part of the archive for free. Much of the collection is protected for data protection reasons, and OCCRP grants access to leaked material to journalists and activists case by case through an application form. Registered users can upload their own documents, build lists of people and companies of interest, sketch connections in an investigation and cross-reference their lists against the archive. Aleph is built on FollowTheMoney, an open source data model for people, companies, assets and payments.
Main Features
- Search people, companies and other entities across millions of documents and records
- Hundreds of datasets, from company registries and gazettes to court and procurement records
- Alerts when new data matching your interests is added
- Private investigations where you can upload documents and share them with colleagues
- Cross-referencing of your lists against the archive to find leads
- Network diagrams to sketch the connections in a story
- Text recognition (OCR) for scanned documents
- REST API and the alephclient command line tool
How to Get Started with OCCRP Aleph
- Open aleph.occrp.org and search for a company, person or other entity.
- Use the dataset and country filters to see where each result comes from.
- If you are a journalist or researcher who needs protected material, apply for an account through OCCRP's registration form and set up the required two-factor authenticator.
- Create an investigation, upload your own documents or lists, and run a cross-reference against the archive.
OCCRP Aleph Pricing
The public instance at aleph.occrp.org is free for journalists, researchers and the public, and OCCRP says this will not change. Access to protected material and leaks is granted free on a case by case basis. OCCRP also offers Aleph Pro to organisations, including hosted, private cloud and on-premise options, with terms arranged through OCCRP.
Who Should Use It?
- Investigative journalists following the money across borders
- Researchers studying corruption and organised crime
- Activists and NGOs working on public-interest investigations
- Data journalists who want to cross-reference their own lists against public records
- Newsrooms that need a shared place to organise documents for a story
OCCRP Aleph Alternatives
- OpenCorporates: an open database of company records gathered from more than 140 government registries.
- ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database: a free database of offshore entities from the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Pandora Papers.
- North Star: a research platform for journalists that combines public records, crypto wallet research and photo geolocation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is OCCRP Aleph free?
Yes. The public instance at aleph.occrp.org is free to search, and OCCRP has said it will stay free and accessible to journalists, researchers and the public. Access to protected datasets and leaks is free but granted case by case to journalists and activists.
Can I use Aleph for KYC or customer screening?
No. OCCRP says its API is meant for journalists and is not a valid way to do know your customer checks for regulated industries. It also does not provide bulk exports to banks, due diligence firms or machine learning researchers.
Is Aleph a place to leak documents to OCCRP?
No. Aleph is a research platform, not a whistleblowing service. If you have documents you want reporters to investigate, OCCRP asks you to use its separate Becoming a Whistleblower page.