Terms of Service

1. Who we are

ReturnMePlz is a business operated by John Passam, a sole trader trading as ReturnMePlz.

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean ReturnMePlz. "You" means the person using the service.

2. What ReturnMePlz is, and what it is not

ReturnMePlz sells QR and NFC tags that you attach to your belongings. Each tag carries a unique code. If somebody finds your tagged item and scans or taps it, they land on a recovery page where they can send you a message. We pass that message to you, and we give you both a private conversation in which you can arrange the item's return.

That is the whole of what we do. It is important that you understand the limits of it:

• We do not find your things. We have no way of knowing where a lost item is. Recovery depends entirely on a real person finding your item, choosing to scan the tag, and choosing to make contact.
• We are not a tracking or location service. Our tags contain no GPS, no battery and no radio beacon. They cannot be located, pinged or traced. A tag is a printed or encoded code, nothing more.
• We are not a security product, an anti-theft device or a substitute for insurance.
• We are not an emergency service. If an item is stolen, or you believe a crime has been committed, contact the police.
• We do not take part in the return itself. We do not collect, hold, transport, inspect or deliver items. We are not a party to any arrangement you make with a finder or an owner.
• We do not verify anyone. We do not check the identity of finders or owners, we do not run background checks, and we cannot confirm that a person is who they say they are or that they hold your item.
• We do not handle rewards. See section 8.

3. No guarantee of recovery

We do not guarantee, promise or warrant that any lost item will be found, returned, or returned undamaged. We make no representation about the likelihood of recovery, the time any recovery may take, or the condition in which an item may come back.

A tag improves the chance that somebody who wants to return your item is able to reach you. It does nothing else. Whether an item comes home depends on things wholly outside our control: whether the item is found at all, whether the finder notices the tag, whether the tag is still attached and legible, whether the finder has a phone and a signal, whether the finder chooses to make contact, and whether the two of you can agree how to get the item back.

Nothing on our website, packaging, social media or marketing should be read as a guarantee of recovery. Where we describe how the service works or quote recovery experiences, we are describing what has happened for some people, not promising a result for you.

4. Eligibility and your account

You must be 18 or over to buy tags, hold a ReturnMePlz account or activate a tag. If you are under 18, ask a parent or guardian to set the account up and manage it.

You do not need an account to send a message as a finder.

You are responsible for the security of your account and for everything done through it. Keep your email account secure, because access to it is how you sign in. Tell us promptly at info@returnmeplz.com if you think somebody else has gained access to your account.

5. Using tags responsibly

When you activate a tag you are telling us the item is yours, or that you have the owner's permission to tag and manage it.

You must not:

• attach a tag to anything belonging to another person in order to monitor, follow, trace or identify them, or their movements, without their knowledge and agreement;
• attach a tag to a person, or to a child's belongings other than as a parent, guardian or carer acting for that child;
• use a tag, a recovery page or the messaging service to harass, stalk, intimidate, threaten or coerce anybody;
• attach a tag to anything unlawful, dangerous, or prohibited from carriage;
• attempt to guess, enumerate, scrape or brute-force tag codes, or access a recovery page or conversation that is not yours;
• copy, clone, resell or re-encode our tags, or represent your own tags as ReturnMePlz tags.

A note on what you write on a tag or in an item label. We deliberately keep your private item label away from finders, and any public note you choose to add is optional and off by default. Please do not put a child's name, your home address, a phone number or any other personal detail into a note that finders can see. What you choose to publish there is your decision and your responsibility.

6. Messages between finders and owners

The conversation between a finder and an owner is content that you and the other person create. It is not ours and we do not check it before it is sent.

Everything you send through ReturnMePlz must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy, which forms part of these terms. That policy sets out what is not allowed, how we deal with illegal or harmful content, and how to report it to us.

We may read, retain, remove or refuse to pass on a message where we reasonably believe it breaches these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, where we are required to by law, or where we need to in order to investigate a report or protect someone from harm. We may suspend or close an account, disable a tag, or block a recovery page for the same reasons. Where we can reasonably do so, we will tell you what we have done and why, and you can challenge it through our Complaints Policy.

Please share only what you need to. A finder must give us an email address, because that is how the owner's replies reach them and how the return gets arranged. We never show a finder's email address to the owner. A finder never has to give their name, their address or any other contact details. An owner never has to give a home address; where an owner chooses to share one for a postal return, we show it only inside the conversation and remove it automatically after ten days. Anything either of you types into a free-text message is passed on as written, so treat it as information you are choosing to give to a stranger.

7. Arranging a return, and meeting in person

Any arrangement to return an item is made between the finder and the owner alone. We are not part of it.

If you decide to meet somebody in person, do so sensibly: meet in a busy public place in daylight, bring somebody with you, tell another person where you are going, and stop if anything feels wrong. If you would rather not meet at all, ask for the item to be posted, or agree to leave it somewhere safe such as a school office, a workplace reception, a café counter or a police station.

If an item is posted, it travels at the risk of the person who sends it, and any dispute about loss, delay or damage in the post is a matter for that person and the carrier they chose.

We are not responsible for the conduct of any finder or owner, online or in person.

8. Rewards

Some owners choose to offer a thank-you reward. If you do, that offer is between you and the finder.

• We do not collect, hold, escrow, transfer, guarantee or enforce rewards. No money passes through ReturnMePlz.
• We do not verify that a reward has been offered honestly, or that it has been paid.
• We take no commission or fee from a reward.
• A reward is a voluntary thank-you. Nobody is entitled to demand payment as a condition of returning something they have found, and doing so may be a criminal offence. Demands of that kind breach our Acceptable Use Policy, report them to us and, if you feel threatened, to the police.

Any dispute about a reward is between the owner and the finder.

9. Availability and changes to the service

We aim to keep ReturnMePlz running and available, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at any particular moment. It depends on third-party hosting, email and network services, and on your own device and connection.

We may change, suspend, add to or withdraw features.

How long your tags will keep working. Worth being straight about this, because a tag is a physical thing that depends on a service behind it:

• Your tags keep working for as long as we operate ReturnMePlz. We intend that to be a long time, and we are building the business to last.
• We do not put an end date on it, and we are not going to pretend we can promise one. ReturnMePlz is a service, and no small business can honestly guarantee a fixed number of years in advance. What we can tell you is that we will not leave you to find out by accident.
• If we ever wind the service down, we will email every account holder at least 90 days before anything stops working, and recovery pages will keep resolving normally throughout that notice period, so you have time to take your tags off your belongings and make other arrangements.
• We will not sell tags we already know we are about to stop supporting. If a wind-down is decided, sales stop first.

Nothing in this section affects your legal rights. Goods you buy from us must still be of satisfactory quality, which includes being reasonably durable, and we cannot and do not exclude that.

This is a separate question from how long we keep your personal information, which is answered in the Privacy Policy. Your tags carry on working long after the messages in an old recovery case have been deleted.

We may deactivate an individual tag that is reported lost, stolen, cloned or misused, or where an account is closed at your request.

10. Our liability to you

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law.

Your statutory rights are unaffected. If you are a consumer, you have legal rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 in relation to the products you buy from us, and nothing in these terms takes those away or restricts them. There is a summary of them in our Terms of Sale.

Subject to the above, we are not responsible for the following, and we exclude liability for them to the fullest extent the law allows:

1. The loss of an item, or the failure of an item to be recovered. This is the central point of these terms. We do not undertake that any item will be recovered, and we are not liable for an item that is not returned, except where the failure was caused by our own failure to use reasonable care and skill in providing the recovery service.
2. The value of a lost item itself, including its replacement cost, its sentimental value, prescription or medical costs, data stored on it, or the cost of cancelling, replacing or re-securing anything it gave access to.
3. The acts, omissions, statements or conduct of any finder, owner or other user, including anything they say to you, anything they do to your item, a failure to return an item, a false claim to have found an item, a demand for payment, abusive or threatening behaviour, or anything that happens at a meeting arranged through the service.
4. Anything that happens after a return is arranged, including loss, delay or damage in the post or by any carrier, or an item left somewhere safe and not collected.
5. Personal information you or another user chooses to share through a message, a public item note, or a meeting.
6. A tag that is removed, covered, destroyed, worn away, or otherwise cannot be scanned, or a scan that fails because of the finder's device, app, camera or network.
7. Interruptions, downtime, delay or data loss caused by a third-party hosting, email or network service, where we have taken reasonable care in choosing and monitoring that service.
8. Reward disputes of any kind.

We are also not liable for any loss that was not reasonably foreseeable at the time you started using the service. We supply the service for domestic and private use. If you use it for any commercial purpose, we have no liability to you for loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption or loss of business opportunity.

Where we are liable to you despite the above, and only for the recovery service (as opposed to products you have bought, where your statutory rights apply in full), our total liability arising out of or in connection with the recovery service is limited to the greater of £100 and the total amount you have paid us for ReturnMePlz products.

11. Your responsibility to us

If a court orders us to pay compensation to somebody else because you deliberately misused ReturnMePlz in breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, we may recover that sum from you. We will not seek anything beyond it. This does not apply to ordinary use of the service.

12. Our intellectual property

The ReturnMePlz name, logo, brand, website, software, recovery pages and content belong to us or our licensors. You may use them only as necessary to use the service. You may not copy, reproduce, adapt, resell or reverse-engineer any part of the service, or use our brand without our written permission.

Content you write, meaning your item labels, notes and messages, remains yours. You give us permission to store it, display it to the other party in a recovery case, and include it in emails and notifications, so that we can run the service. This does not apply to a delivery address you share through the address form: that is never put into an email, and it is deleted as described in the Privacy Policy.

13. Ending it

You may stop using ReturnMePlz at any time. You can ask us to close your account and delete your information by emailing info@returnmeplz.com, see the Privacy Policy for what happens to your data.

We may suspend or end your access, with notice where reasonably possible, if you breach these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if we are required to by law, or if we withdraw the service under section 9.

Sections 3, 8, 10, 11 and 12 survive the ending of these terms.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example, when the service changes or the law does. The version on this page is always the current one, and the effective date is shown at the top. If a change materially reduces your rights or increases your obligations, we will tell account holders by email at least 30 days before it takes effect, and say what is changing and why. If you do not accept the change, you can close your account before it takes effect at no cost.

15. General

Whole agreement. These terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy, the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy (and the Terms of Sale where you have bought from us), are the entire agreement between us about the recovery service. Nothing in this paragraph limits our responsibility for anything we have told you about the service that later turns out to be untrue.

Severability. If any part of these terms is found to be unlawful or unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

No waiver. If we do not insist that you do something, or delay in enforcing our rights, that does not prevent us from doing so later.

No third-party rights. Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

Events outside our control. We are not liable for a failure to perform caused by something outside our reasonable control, including power or network failure, the failure of a third-party service, industrial action, fire, flood, epidemic, or an act of government.

Transfer. We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another business, for example if we sell the business. We will tell you if that happens and it will not affect your rights.

16. Law and courts

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them, are governed by the law of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer, you may bring proceedings in the courts of England and Wales, and, if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings there. We will only bring proceedings against you in the courts of the part of the UK in which you live. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you keep the benefit of any consumer protection there that you cannot be deprived of by agreement.

If something goes wrong, please tell us first: most things are quicker to fix directly. Our Complaints Policy explains how, and what to do if you are not satisfied with our answer.

17. Contact

ReturnMePlz
Lytchett House, 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Rd, Poole, Dorset BH16 6FA
info@returnmeplz.com