Privacy Policy

• We ask for as little as we can, and you can send a tip without telling us who you are.
• We do not sell, rent, or trade your information. Ever, to anyone.
• This site uses Google Analytics to count visits, and that sets cookies. It carries no advertising pixels.
• Four companies handle data on our behalf: Resend for email, Cloudflare for hosting, Snowflake for our database and Google for counting visits.
• Ask us and we will take you off our list, and take your name off a tip you sent.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those five lines.

This site is published by Cyber Investigation Services, LLC, a Florida limited liability company (document number L10000121819). We find the people selling counterfeit products under real brand names on eBay and Amazon.

We are the party responsible for the information described here. Our mailing address is in Contact at the foot of this page.

When you put a brand on the Watch List we collect:

That is the whole list. We never sell your details.

Your sign-up is stored in our own database, hosted by Snowflake. A short notice of each sign-up is emailed to us through Resend, and Resend also sends you the confirmation.

Take your brand off the list any time with one email to the address at the foot of this page. We remove it and stop watching.

We no longer offer an email signup for articles. New papers and category reports go only to brands on our Watch List.

If you signed up before, we hold your email address, the group you picked and the page you signed up from with Resend, the service that stored our contact list. We do not use them for anything else. Ask us at the address at the foot of this page and we remove the record entirely.

The tip form asks you to describe something you saw: what happened, where you saw it, when, and links if you have them. You can add what you paid and any evidence links. You are asked to confirm the account is true to the best of your knowledge.

Every question about you personally is optional. Name, email, region, and role can all be left blank, and a tip with all of them blank is still a complete, usable tip.

Be aware of one thing: anything you type into the form reaches our team, including an email address you entered but did not mean to be contacted about. If you want to stay anonymous, leave the contact fields empty rather than relying on the checkboxes.

Those two checkboxes at the end govern whether we write back to you, not whether your address is sent. Keep me posted on this tip needs an email, because the box is a promise to update you. Tell me how CIS can help means we will write to you once about our work. Leave both unticked and we will not use your address for either.

Please do not put Social Security numbers, dates of birth, account numbers, or passwords into the form. We do not need them and we do not want to hold them.

When you submit, your tip is sent by email to the people who review tips, and you are shown a reference number. Anything you wrote travels in that message, including your name and email if you gave them. Tips arrive by email to our tip address.

If the form itself cannot reach us, it offers to send your account from your own email program instead. It carries the category, where and when you saw it, the main link, the seller, the brand, the product, and what you wrote. It does not carry the name, email, region, or role you typed, your evidence links, or the money details. But your own email address travels with the message, because you are the sender. If you would rather not send it that way, close the message and try the form again later.

While you are filling the form in, your draft is saved inside your own browser so a reload does not lose your work. That draft never leaves your device and is cleared once your tip goes through. If a submission fails it stays there so you do not lose your work, and closing the tab clears it.

Four companies process information on our behalf, each under its own privacy terms:

That anti-bot check is Cloudflare Turnstile, and it runs invisibly. There is no puzzle to solve, so you may never notice it. What Cloudflare collects to tell people from bots is set out in its Turnstile Privacy Addendum. We chose it because it is the privacy-preserving option: it does not track you across websites, and Cloudflare does not use what it sees here to build an advertising profile of you.

All four are United States companies, and all four run from data centers in more than one country, so your information may be handled outside the country you live in.

Apart from those four, we share nothing with anyone for any commercial purpose. We do not sell, rent, or trade your information. We would disclose information if a valid legal process required it, and where we are lawfully able to tell you, we will.

Every page on this site loads Google Analytics. We use it to count visits: how many people come, which pages they read, and roughly where they come from.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies in your browser (their names start with _ga) so it can tell one visit from the next. When a page loads, Google receives your IP address and the ordinary details of your browser, and handles them under its own privacy terms.

You can opt out two ways. Block cookies for this site in your browser settings, or install Google’s Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Either one stops your visits being counted. The rest of the site works the same.

• No advertising and no marketing pixels on this site. Our email is a separate matter: like most senders, Resend can tell us whether an email was delivered and whether it was opened. We use that to see whether the writing is landing, never to build a profile of you.
• No cookies of our own. The only thing we put in your browser is the tip-form draft described above. Google Analytics sets its cookies, as described in Visit counting. Cloudflare sets its own, for security and for the anti-bot check on our forms.
• No accounts, no passwords, no profiles.
• No payments. Nothing on this site takes money from you.

• Past email signups: until you ask us to delete them.
• Watch List sign-ups: until you ask us to take your brand off the list. One email does it.
• Tips: we keep them while the matter they describe is open, and afterwards as a record of what was reported. Tips are the raw material of the work, so we do not delete them on a timer. Your contact details are a separate matter. Ask, and so far as that tip is in our hands we will remove them, leaving it as an anonymous tip.
• Google Analytics visit data: held by Google under its own retention rules and our account settings.
• Cloudflare's server records: held by Cloudflare on their own retention schedule, not ours.

Write to us at the address below and, within 30 days of us being satisfied who you are, we will:

• Tell you what we hold about you.
• Correct anything wrong.
• Delete you from our contact list.
• Take your brand off the Watch List.
• Remove your name and contact details from a tip you sent, so far as that tip is in our hands.

You do not have to explain why, and we do not charge for it. If you sent a tip, quoting the reference number you were shown makes it much faster to find. Without it, an anonymous tip may be impossible for us to identify as yours.

We check who you are before we act on a request, because we will not hand someone else's information to whoever asks for it. That is a protection for you, not an obstacle.

Depending on where you live, local law may give you further rights over your information. Where those laws apply to us, we will honor them. Ask.

This site is meant for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something, write to us and we will delete it.

The site is served over HTTPS and the forms carry an anti-bot check. We do not publish your tip or your identity.

Nobody can honestly promise perfect security. What we can promise is that we hold as little as possible, which is the only protection that never fails.

If we learn that information we hold about you has been exposed in a way that could harm you, we will tell you as soon as we reasonably can, and we will tell you what happened rather than the least we can get away with.

If we change how we handle your information we will update this page and move the last updated date at the top. If a change is significant and we hold your email address, we will tell you by email rather than expect you to notice.

Questions about this policy, or any request above, are best sent by email:

privacy@cyberinvestigationservices.com

Our address of record is below. Email is faster.