Acceptable Use Policy
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This Acceptable Use Policy forms part of our Terms of Service. It sets out what you must not do with the Service. Breaching it may result in immediate suspension without refund and, where appropriate, referral to law enforcement.
1. Legitimate uses
People use temporary numbers for sound reasons, including:
- keeping a personal number private when signing up to a service;
- avoiding marketing SMS and number resale;
- testing your own product's SMS verification flow;
- registering for a service in a country where you do not hold a local SIM;
- separating a work identity from a personal one.
2. Prohibited uses
You must not use the Service:
Fraud and deception
- to commit fraud, financial crime, or to launder money;
- to impersonate another real person or organisation;
- to open financial, banking, payment, credit or cryptocurrency-exchange accounts in someone else's name, or to defeat identity-verification requirements that apply to you by law;
- to bypass sanctions screening or know-your-customer obligations.
Harm to others
- to harass, stalk, threaten, defame or endanger any person;
- to facilitate any activity involving the abuse or exploitation of children;
- to obtain, distribute or solicit content that is unlawful in your jurisdiction or ours;
- to gain unauthorised access to any account, system or data you are not entitled to.
Abuse of platforms
- to create accounts in bulk for spam, manipulation, fake reviews or artificial engagement;
- to evade a ban, suspension or blocking lawfully imposed on you by a platform;
- in breach of the terms of service of the platform you are verifying against.
Abuse of this Service
- to resell access in a way that conceals these rules from your own users;
- to create multiple accounts to abuse referral commission, promotions or limits;
- to attack, overload, probe or reverse-engineer our infrastructure, or to circumvent rate limits or security controls;
- to scrape our catalogue or pricing systematically outside the documented API.
3. Numbers are shared and temporary
A number you receive is temporary and will be reissued to other customers afterwards. Do not use it for anything you need continued access to — not for banking, not for a primary email account, not as a recovery number, and not for two-factor authentication on any account that matters to you. Whoever holds the number later can receive messages sent to it.
4. If you resell
If you use our API to provide numbers to your own customers, you remain responsible for their conduct as if it were your own. You must impose terms on them at least as restrictive as this policy, and act on abuse reports we send you.
5. Reporting abuse
If a number issued by us has been used to harm you, contact support (at) sms.rip with the number, the approximate time and a description. We investigate every report, can permanently block a number from reissue, and will cooperate with valid legal requests from law enforcement.
6. Enforcement
Where we reasonably believe this policy has been breached we may, proportionately to the seriousness of the breach:
- refuse a particular order or restrict access to certain services or countries;
- suspend the account pending investigation;
- terminate the account and, where lawful, withhold the remaining balance;
- preserve and disclose relevant records to law enforcement where legally required.
If you believe we have acted on a mistaken assessment, reply to the notice we send and we will review it.
Questions about this document? support (at) sms.rip