Muhammad Zakir Khan, an assistant professor of speech communication at Florida’s Broward College, wanted to play the multiplayer online video game “Paragon.” But when he tried to create an account on Sunday, a message popped up on his screen saying he had been blocked.

The problem? He was told he couldn’t create an account “as a result of a match against the Specially Designated Nationals List maintained by the United States of America’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.”

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Incidents like this “happen fairly often,” according to Shirin Sinnar, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School. That is because the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list has nearly 6,000 names on it, she told NBC News, many of them “extremely common Latino and Muslim names.”

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But the law is “extremely broad,” Sinnar told NBC News. “The law essentially says that no U.S. person — your hairstylist, the corner grocery store — is allowed to engage in any transaction with anyone on this list.”

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“Sometimes, companies don’t even know what the list is about,” she said. “They are depending on some product that, in some automated way, offers OPAC screening as one of its features.”

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It’s hard to tell how many Internet companies screen against the list, but it’s probably not as ubiquitous as in the banking industry, Sinnar said, or else “we would be hearing about a lot more cases of name matches.”