How we handle your story

A person reads everything

Every submission is read by a member of our team before it appears anywhere. Nothing is published automatically.

We remove identifying details

Before a story goes up we take out anything that could identify you or someone else: names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, employers, account numbers, and similar. You choose your own pseudonym and give only a general location.

We edit lightly, and we keep your voice

Sometimes we tidy spelling or reword a sentence that is hard to follow. Beyond that we leave stories as they were written. The voice belongs to the person who lived it, and we would rather publish something rough and real than something polished into someone else’s words.

We do not verify claims

These are personal accounts of what people experienced. We are not an investigative body and we do not attempt to confirm the details of any story. Please read them as first-hand experiences rather than as established fact.

Naming companies and people

We do not name individuals as scammers. Where a scammer impersonated a company, we may name that company, because the impersonation is the useful part and the company is a target too. Where a story criticises how an organisation responded, we usually describe it in general terms rather than naming it.

What we may decline

We may decline a submission that is spam or promotional, targets or harasses a named person or business, or that we cannot safely anonymise.

After publication

Because we deliberately do not collect accounts or identifiers, we usually cannot verify who submitted a given story later on. If you want something changed or removed, contact us at hello@shieldmate.io and we will do what we reasonably can. Our full terms are on the Terms page, and what we collect is set out in our Privacy policy.