Terms of Service

1. Who these terms are between

These terms are between you and GBNP Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, number 16545255, trading as Verafor, which these terms call "we", "us" and "Verafor". Its registered office is 82a James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds, IP28 7DE.

They apply when you use verafor.com or the Verafor platform. By creating an account you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not create an account.

We use three words throughout. A candidate is an individual building a verified passport. An organisation is a company using Verafor to hire, whether as the employer or as an agency acting for one. An issuer is a university, employer, professional body or other organisation that confirms something about a candidate.

2. What Verafor does

We verify things about people and organisations, and we introduce verified candidates to verified organisations. We record what has been verified, and we publish a cryptographic hash of each verified credential to a public blockchain so that it can be checked later without us.

3. What we do not promise

Read this section. It is the one that matters most.

• We do not promise anyone a job, a hire, or any outcome. We verify and we introduce. What happens in an interview is not ours.
• We do not warrant that what an issuer tells us is true. When a university confirms a degree or an employer confirms a role, we record that they confirmed it. We check who they are, not whether they are right.
• An identity check is not a guarantee of identity. Our provider checks a government document and a live face against its own standards. That is strong evidence and it is not a certainty, and no verification system can make it one.
• We do not carry out criminal record checks. You may see one priced. It cannot be bought and we do not do it.
• We do not promise that a credential will be accepted by anyone. Whether a third party trusts a Verafor credential is that third party's decision.
• We do not promise the service will be uninterrupted. We will try, and we do not guarantee it.

4. Your account

Keep your details accurate and your credentials to yourself. One account per person. Do not share a login. Where we require a second authentication factor, you must keep it working, and you are responsible for what is done with your account.

You must be at least 16 to use Verafor.

5. Candidates

Registering is free. Activating a verified passport costs £20, once. Founding cohort members pay nothing for it.

Your 14 day right to cancel. Because you are buying from us at a distance, you have 14 days from your purchase to cancel it and get your money back, and this applies even if we have already carried out your identity check. Write to us at founders@verafor.com and we will refund you. We may keep the credential's record for our own audit trail, and we will remove you from the market and delete your account on request as our privacy notice describes.

Nothing is shared with an organisation without your consent, each time. We will tell you who is asking and about what role, and you choose. If you do not answer, the request expires and nothing is shared. You can stop being matched entirely by changing your seeking status.

Tell us the truth. Do not claim a qualification you do not hold, submit a document that is not yours, or use somebody else's identity. If you do, we will suspend your account, revoke the credentials affected, and keep a record of why.

A verified credential cannot be edited by you. That is the point of it. If something in one is wrong, tell us and we will take it up with the issuer.

6. Organisations

Subscription. Your plan sets how many candidates you may unlock in a month, how many roles you may run at once and how many seats you get. You pay monthly in advance at the price for the plan you chose. If you go beyond your monthly candidates and your plan permits it, each additional candidate is charged at your plan's rate. An unused candidate carries into the following period and then expires. Prices and allowances are the ones shown when you subscribe.

Seats are for named people. Each seat belongs to one person at your organisation. Do not share one, and tell us when somebody leaves.

You must be who you say you are. We match your organisation against Companies House, we confirm a working email address at your own domain, and we check that the person posting a role is authorised by the organisation the role is for. An agency may not attest to anything on behalf of a client. If your registration lapses or your domain stops answering, your verification lapses with it.

Deposits on roles. Every role carries a refundable deposit of 1% of the advertised salary, capped at £2,000. We take it when you post and we return it when the role closes.

• You get one free cancellation. After that, cancelling a role costs 10% of the deposit and we return the rest.
• You keep your deposit if you tell us what happened, including if you hired nobody.
• You lose your deposit if you go silent. That only applies where we actually gave you candidates. We will ask you what happened when the role's advertising period ends, ask again 30 days later, and warn you in writing seven days before the deposit goes. You have 60 days. If we never gave you a single candidate, we will not ask and you will not lose anything.

Per-role purchases. Where you buy something individually rather than through your plan, such as viewing a passport, the price is shown before you pay.

What you may do with a candidate's data. When a candidate consents to share their details with you, you become responsible for that data in your own right, under your own privacy notice and your own legal obligations. Use it to consider them for the role you named, and nothing else. Do not pass it on, do not add them to a database for later, and do not contact them about something else.

You are not a consumer. If you are using Verafor for your business, the consumer cancellation right in section 5 does not apply to you.

7. Things nobody may do

• Scrape, crawl or bulk download the platform or anything on it.
• Misrepresent who you are, who you work for, or what a role is.
• Use Verafor to approach a candidate about anything other than the role you named.
• Resell, sublicense or share your access.
• Try to break, probe or get around our security, or anybody's account but your own.
• Upload malware, or anything unlawful.

If you do any of these we can suspend or close your account immediately.

8. Fees and payment

Fees are in pounds sterling and are taken by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. We are not currently registered for VAT, so no VAT is added to the prices shown. If we become registered we will show VAT separately before you pay.

If a payment fails we may suspend the service until it succeeds. We do not charge interest on a late payment from a consumer.

9. Ending it

You can leave at any time. Close your account from your settings, or ask us. A subscription runs to the end of the period you have paid for and then stops.

We can end it too, if you break these terms, if you do not pay, or if we have to stop offering the service. Except where you have broken these terms, we will give you reasonable notice and refund anything you have paid for and not received.

What happens to your data is in our privacy notice. In short: we remove you from the market straight away, there is a 30 day window in which you can change your mind, and then your account is erased. Hashes already published to the blockchain cannot be erased, and they contain no personal data: a hash cannot be turned back into what it was made from.

10. Our content and yours

The platform, its software and its design are ours. You may not copy them.

What you upload stays yours. You give us permission to use it to run the service, verify it, show it to the organisations you consent to, and nothing else.

11. If something goes wrong

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything written here, and nothing in these terms takes them away.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows: if you are an organisation, our total liability to you for all claims arising in any twelve month period is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in that period and one hundred pounds. If you are a consumer, we do not cap our liability beyond the exclusions above, and your statutory rights are unaffected.

We are not liable for a hiring decision you make, for a candidate's conduct, for an organisation's conduct, or for anything a third party does with data you consented to share.

12. Changes

We may change these terms. If a change matters we will email account holders and give reasonable notice, and if you do not accept it you can close your account. For a subscription, a price change takes effect at your next renewal and not during a period you have paid for.

13. Law and where disputes go

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you keep the right to bring proceedings where you live, and the protections of your local law.

14. Talking to us

Write to founders@verafor.com. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data you can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.