Why this exists
ReturnMePlz lets a stranger who has found a lost item send a message to the person who lost it. That is a small, kind thing, and it is what the service is for. This policy is here for the people who use it for something else, and so that you know what we will do about them.
It also sets out how we protect people from illegal content on our service, as we are required to do.
The short version
Use ReturnMePlz to reunite people with their belongings. Be decent to the person on the other end. Do not use it to reach, track, pressure or exploit anybody.
What you must not do
Harm to people
- Harass, bully, threaten, intimidate or abuse anyone.
- Send sexual content, or content that sexualises any person.
- Send anything to, or about, a child that would be inappropriate for a stranger to send a child.
- Encourage or assist self-harm, suicide or an eating disorder.
- Send hateful content, or abuse someone for their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or any other characteristic.
- Use the service to trace, monitor, follow or identify a person or their movements.
- Attach a tag to another person's property, or to a person, in order to track them.
Dishonesty and exploitation
- Claim to have found an item you do not have.
- Demand money, a "release fee", a ransom or any payment as a condition of returning an item. A reward is a voluntary thank-you offered by an owner, never something a finder may insist on.
- Attempt to obtain someone's home address, contact details, financial details or passwords by deception.
- Send links to fraudulent or malicious sites, or attempt phishing of any kind.
- Impersonate another person, or claim to be from ReturnMePlz, the police, a school, a delivery company or any other organisation.
- Use a recovery conversation to advertise, market, spam or recruit.
Misuse of the service itself
- Guess, enumerate, scrape or brute-force tag codes, or try to reach a recovery page or conversation that is not yours.
- Attempt to break, overload, probe or circumvent the security of the service.
- Copy, clone or re-encode our tags, or pass off other tags as ours.
- Use bots or automated tools against the service.
- Publish, in an item note or a message, someone else's personal information without their agreement.
Illegal content
You must not use ReturnMePlz to send, share or store content that is illegal. That includes, and we treat these as the most serious of all:
- Child sexual exploitation and abuse content. Any sexual content involving a child, any attempt to groom, solicit or arrange to meet a child for sexual purposes, and any attempt to obtain sexual images from a child.
- Terrorist content. Content that encourages, praises, assists or is published on behalf of a proscribed organisation, or that incites acts of terrorism.
- Other serious illegal content, including threats to kill or cause serious harm, incitement to violence, extreme pornography, intimate image abuse (sharing or threatening to share private sexual images), harassment and stalking, controlling or coercive behaviour, drugs or weapons offers, fraud and financial crime, human trafficking, encouraging suicide, and hate crime.
How we protect people from illegal content
We keep the service small and hard to abuse by design, and we act on what we are told.
By design. A recovery conversation is private and one-to-one: there is no public posting, no profile, no search, no discovery of other users, no file or image upload, and no way to reach a person who has not chosen to be in a conversation with you. Tag codes are long and unguessable, and message submissions are rate-limited, so the service cannot be trawled for people to contact. An owner's private item label is never shown to a finder, and any public note is optional and off by default. An owner's postal address is shown only inside a conversation, only when the owner chooses to share it, and is removed automatically after ten days.
When something is reported. Anyone, including a finder with no account, can report a message or a conversation using the report link in the conversation, or by emailing info@returnmeplz.com. We aim to acknowledge a report within 2 working days and to review it promptly. Where we have reason to believe content is illegal, we take it down swiftly, and we may disable the conversation, the tag and the account behind it.
When it is serious. Content involving the sexual exploitation or abuse of a child is reported to the National Crime Agency. Terrorist content is reported to the police. We will cooperate with law enforcement and, where the law requires or permits it, disclose information to them. We may preserve evidence of illegal activity even where we have removed the content from view.
Who is responsible. The Founder of ReturnMePlz is the person responsible for online safety compliance and can be reached at info@returnmeplz.com.
We do not currently scan the content of messages automatically. Content is reviewed when it is reported to us, or when something else brings it to our attention. We do use automated checks to detect spam, abuse and attempts to trawl our codes, and our email provider applies its own filtering. If we introduce content scanning, we will update this policy first.
Children
ReturnMePlz accounts are for adults. You must be 18 or over to buy a tag, hold an account or activate a tag.
We know that children may nonetheless scan a tag, a child who finds a classmate's lost water bottle is exactly the sort of person our service depends on. If you are a child using a recovery page: you never have to give your name or your phone number, but sending a message does need an email address, so the owner's reply can reach you. The owner never sees it. It is best to tell a parent, a teacher or another adult you trust, and let them send the message with their own email address and help you hand the item in. You should not agree to meet an adult you do not know.
If you believe a child is at risk, contact the police on 999, or the NSPCC on 0808 800 5000. Report it to us at info@returnmeplz.com as well, and we will act on it.
Reporting something
In a conversation: use the report link.
By email: info@returnmeplz.com.
Tell us what you saw, where, and when. If you are in immediate danger, call 999 first.
You can report content whether or not you have an account, and whether or not you are the person it was sent to.
What we do about breaches
Depending on what has happened, we may:
- remove or refuse to deliver a message;
- close a recovery conversation;
- disable a tag or a recovery page;
- suspend or permanently close an account, and refuse to serve you in future;
- report the matter to the police or another authority;
- take legal action to recover any loss you have caused us.
We take the seriousness of the breach, its effect on other people, and whether it has happened before into account when deciding.
If you think we got it wrong
If we have removed your content, disabled your tag or closed your account and you think that was a mistake, tell us at info@returnmeplz.com and say why. Please come back to us within 30 days if you can, while the details are fresh, but we will not refuse to look at something simply because more time has passed. Someone will review it and give you an answer. Our Complaints Policy sets out the full process.
Changes
We may update this policy as the service and the law change. The current version is always the one on this page.
ReturnMePlz · Lytchett House, 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Rd, Poole, Dorset BH16 6FA · info@returnmeplz.com