Terms of use

Private marketplace listings

The marketplace is for private individuals selling or giving away their own belongings. SARAFAN displays listings and helps people obtain contacts; it does not take payment for an item, arrange delivery, provide escrow or buyer protection, or become a party to the transaction. Participants agree inspection, payment and handover outside SARAFAN. Sold and Given away are the author’s statements, not our confirmation of a transaction.

Publishing requires sign-in, a verified email and acceptance of the current Marketplace rules, which have their own version. When that version changes, publication and renewal require new acceptance. Authors must be aged 18 or over, act privately and offer their own items within the permitted range. These are author obligations: we do not verify age, private-seller status, identity, ownership or item safety. A verified email only confirms control of an email address.

A signed-in visitor obtains protected contacts through an explicit request, subject to separate marketplace limits. Repeat requests also consume those limits. Further communication uses Telegram, WhatsApp or phone; SARAFAN has no transaction chat. A contact request does not prove that a message was sent or a transaction completed.

Marketplace moderation and removal

Items enter post-moderation. We may hide with a public reason and an opportunity to correct, block the item, or restrict publication in the market. Serious breaches may require immediate blocking. Do not evade decisions by copying a listing. Editing does not remove a block; a moderator’s unblocking returns the original item paused. Publication restrictions leave closing, deletion, reading the decision and data export available. For pilot appeals, write to the legal contact above with the item link or ID, decision and reasons for disagreement.

Marketplace contact records are separate from specialist introductions and follow the marketplace retention and account-erasure process in the Privacy notice. Account erasure immediately takes the author’s items off the feed, deletes protected contacts and queues files for deletion; remaining data follows that process. We cannot recall downloaded copies or participants’ external messages.

Our role in an item transaction does not exclude SARAFAN’s own obligations or any rights or liabilities that cannot lawfully be excluded. Optional directory profile promotion is a separate SARAFAN service under its promotion terms and applicable consumer rights; it does not make us a party to an item transaction. Marketplace-item promotion cannot be purchased on the site.

What we do and what we do not do

We publish service and community listings and pass on protected contact details. We are not a party to any service, membership, event or other arrangement made after an introduction; we do not take payment for those arrangements, schedule them or guarantee their outcome. The people involved decide whether to proceed and on what terms or price.

Your account

You must be at least 18 to create an account. Give accurate information, keep access to your email or other sign-in method secure, and tell us promptly if you believe somebody else has used your account. You are responsible for activity carried out through your account until you notify us or end the affected sessions.

What the badge means

Professional verification badges apply only to service listings, not community listings. A “verified” badge means a person on our side looked at a document — an identity paper, a professional licence or an insurance certificate — and matched it against a register where one exists. It says the document was seen; it is not an endorsement or a guarantee of future work.

A service-listing badge can be taken away. When that happens the reason is recorded and the owner is told.

Listings and moderation

New and edited listings, requests, reviews, replies and photos are published immediately and enter our post-moderation queue. A moderator can mark them as reviewed or hide content that breaches these terms; publication does not mean SARAFAN has endorsed it.

We may hide content that misrepresents a person, business or community, offers things we will not carry, or contains somebody else’s contact details. The author is told the public reason and can rework it; saving a correction publishes it again and creates a new review item.

You can take your own listing off the catalogue at any time and put it back without a moderator’s permission.

Contact details and quotas

Every release of somebody’s contact details counts against a daily quota. This is not a paywall — the service is free at the moment. It is what keeps the contact base from being copied wholesale, which would end the catalogue for everyone in it. Automated collection, resale of contact details and bulk messaging are grounds for closing an account without warning.

Reviews

Any signed-in user, including a Telegram user without email, can immediately review a published listing except their own. Write about your real experience of a service or community interaction. Each account may leave one review per listing and at most five reviews in any 24-hour period. A previous contact request through SARAFAN is optional; where one exists, the review is linked to the latest eligible request and marked “Contacted through SARAFAN”. This confirms a contact request, not a completed service or transaction. Reviews count towards the rating immediately, including reviews without a contact request. Reviews and the listing owner’s reply are published immediately and moderated afterwards. We do not remove a review for being unflattering; we remove it for being untrue, abusive or about a different listing.

Illegal and harmful content

Do not post or send content that is unlawful, fraudulent, threatening, hateful, sexually exploitative, abusive, invasive of privacy, or that infringes another person’s intellectual-property rights. Do not use SARAFAN to facilitate an illegal service or transaction.

Use the report control where one is available, or write to the legal contact shown on this page. We may investigate, preserve evidence, restrict an account, and refuse, hide or remove content where that is necessary to enforce these terms or comply with law. If you believe we made the wrong decision, send the item, the decision and your reasons to the same address for review.

Changes to these terms

The version shown at the top is the version you accept when an account is created or at the first login after these terms change. We will give existing users reasonable notice before a material change takes effect. A change needed urgently for security or law may take effect sooner, with notice as soon as reasonably possible.

Leaving

Delete your account from the cabinet. Sessions end immediately, data follows the deletion process, normally within 30 days. A listing that somebody already asked contacts for stays as a depersonalised row: it holds nothing about you, but the introduction has to remember it happened.

Liability and law

We provide the service as it is. We are not liable for the quality, safety or legality of services, meetings, events, memberships or other arrangements made through an introduction, nor for what the people involved say to each other. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, and nothing here removes rights you have as a consumer.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you are in Canada, this does not take away the statutory protections you have there.

Who is responsible