Staying safe

AnonChat connects you to a stranger. That is the point of it, and it is also the risk. Please read this before you assume anything about who is on the other end.

We do not know who anyone is

We ask people to confirm they are 18 or older and we keep a record of that answer. We do not verify it, and we want to be plain rather than reassuring: someone willing to lie will get past that check. The same is true of everything else a person tells you here — their age, their gender, their location, their photograph if they describe one.

Do not share these

• Your full name, address, school or workplace
• Your phone number, email, or handles on other apps
• Photographs of yourself, especially intimate ones
• Bank details, card numbers, or cryptocurrency addresses
• Anything that would let someone find you offline

A conversation here does not need any of it. Someone who keeps pushing for it, however friendly, is telling you something about themselves.

Warning signs

• Wanting to move to another app quickly. Off here, there is no report button and no record. This is the most common first step in a conversation that goes wrong.
• Asking your age early, then steering the conversation sexual.
• Flattery that escalates fast, or insisting a conversation is a secret.
• Any request for money, however sympathetic the reason.
• Pressure to turn on a camera or send a photograph, then threats about what they will do with it. If this happens to you, do not pay. Stop replying, report it here, and report it to your local police.

If something happens

Leave the conversation and report it. The report button stays available after the other person has gone, which is deliberate — the moment they leave is often exactly when you realise something was wrong.

Reporting takes a copy of the conversation and sends it to a moderator. You do not need to keep the tab open, and you do not need to screenshot anything. Reports about a minor, or about threats, are looked at first.

Chats are otherwise deleted after 30 days — so if something happened and you did not report it at the time, report it rather than assuming we can retrieve it later.

If you are under 18

This service is not for you, and we are not saying that to be unwelcoming. It puts you in a private conversation with an adult stranger who cannot be identified. Please use something built for your age instead.

If an adult here has said something sexual to you, or asked you for photographs, that is not your fault and you have not done anything wrong by being here. Tell an adult you trust, and report it — in the UK to the CEOP Safety Centre, in the US to the NCMEC CyberTipline.

What we do at our end

A person reads the reports, and can block someone temporarily or permanently. We flag conversations where someone appears to state they are under 18. We limit how fast the service can be used, which makes some kinds of abuse harder.

None of that makes this a supervised space. Nobody is watching your conversation while it happens, and the controls we have are ways of responding after the fact, not of preventing harm as it occurs. Please do not use the service as though someone is looking after you.

Contact

For anything a report cannot cover, including law enforcement requests, write to contact@stonklab.com.