Contact

1. The address

Everything reaches us at [email protected]. There's one address, not six, because six addresses with one person behind them is theatre.

There's no phone line, no postal counter, and no live chat window. A service this size that advertised any of those would be lying about at least one of them.

2. Subject lines that route

The inbox is sorted by subject line. Using one of these puts your message in the right pile immediately:

• CHILD SAFETY: anything involving someone who may be under 18. This is pulled out of the ordinary queue. The full standard is on the child safety page.
• REPORT: a user who broke the community guidelines in a way the in-product report button didn't cover.
• DATA: access, correction, deletion, portability, or any other right under section 9 of the privacy policy. Account deletion goes here.
• BILLING: a charge you don't recognise, a purchase that didn't arrive, coins missing from a balance.
• APPEAL: your account was suspended or closed and you think the decision was wrong.
• COPYRIGHT or COUNTER-NOTICE: takedowns, handled per the copyright page.
• LEGAL: requests from law enforcement, regulators, and lawyers acting for someone.

Anything that fits none of those is fine without a tag. Plain questions get plain answers.

3. What to include

Most messages that take a long time to resolve are slow because of what was missing from the first email, not because of a queue.

• Write from the address on the account, if you've one. It's the simplest proof that the account is yours, and asking you to prove it another way wastes a day.
• Say roughly when. Date and approximate time, and your timezone. "Last week" covers several hundred sessions.
• Say what you saw, not what you concluded. The details are what we can match against records.
• For billing: the amount, the currency, the date, and the last four digits of the card or the payment method used.
• For a guest session with no account: tell us when and roughly from where you used the service. It's harder to identify, and we'll say so instead of pretending otherwise.

4. Things that shouldn't go to email

• Someone in immediate danger. Contact your local emergency services first. They can act in minutes. We can't, and an email to us costs time that matters.
• Images or video of suspected abuse material. Do not attach it to anything, to us or to anyone else. Describe it and tell us where to look.
• Your password. Nobody here will ever ask for it, and nobody here needs it. An email asking you for it isn't from us.
• A live problem in a call. Use the in-product report button. It carries the room and timing automatically, which is exactly what an email can't.

5. Legal and law enforcement

Requests from law enforcement and regulators should identify the agency, the legal basis, and what specifically is being asked for, and should come from an official address. We respond to valid requests and we'll preserve records on request while a process is underway.

Where there's a credible indication that a child is at risk, we don't wait to be asked. That's set out in section 6 of the child safety standards.

6. What to expect

A person reads it and writes back. We deliberately don't publish a response time, because a number we can't hold to every single time is worse than no number. You would be right to hold us to it, and we would rather not start that way.

What we'll do is tell you what's happening, including when the answer is that we can't help. WhoChat Live would rather say no clearly than leave an email unanswered.