Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy sets out what you may and may not do on Orthodate. It applies to everyone who uses the service — free members, subscribers and visitors — and to everything you put on it: your profile, your photographs, your messages, your reports and anything you send to our support team.

It forms part of our Terms & Conditions, and breaking it is a breach of those Terms. Where this policy and the Terms overlap, both apply.

Orthodate is a dating service for single Orthodox Christians aged 18 and over. The rules below exist so that it stays what it says it is: a place where adults can look for a relationship without being sold to, scammed, harassed or shown things they did not ask to see.

You may use Orthodate only if all of the following are true.

• You are at least 18 years old.
• You are legally able to enter into a contract with us.
• You have never been convicted of a felony, a sex offence or a violent crime, and you are not listed on any sex-offender register.
• You have not previously been removed from Orthodate.
• You are using one account, which is your own, and it represents a real person — you.

If any of these stops being true, you must stop using the service and close your account.

The following are absolutely prohibited on Orthodate, whether the content or conduct appears on the service or is arranged through it and carried out elsewhere. They are set out separately from the lists below because they are not matters of degree, there is no context in which they are permitted, and a single instance ends an account permanently.

Child sexual exploitation and abuse, including CSAM.You must not post, upload, send, request, link to, solicit, produce, distribute or possess on Orthodate any child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or any other sexual or sexualised content involving a person under 18, real, drawn, animated or synthetically generated. You must not sexualise a minor, groom, solicit, extort or attempt to meet a minor for a sexual purpose, or misrepresent your age to a minor. Orthodate is for adults aged 18 and over; no account may be created for, on behalf of, or depicting a minor. Content of this kind is removed, the account is closed permanently, the evidence is preserved, and the matter is reported to law enforcement and to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Non-consensual content. You must not post, send, request, threaten to share, or otherwise distribute any content involving a person who has not consented to it. This includes intimate or sexual images or recordings of a person shared without that person’s consent (often called non-consensual intimate imagery, NCII or “revenge porn”); images or recordings made covertly, such as hidden-camera, voyeuristic or upskirt material; content depicting rape, sexual assault, coercion or any sexual act to which a participant did not or could not consent; sexual or nude deepfakes and other synthetic media depicting a real person without their consent; and another person’s photographs, messages, private information or likeness published without their permission. Sextortion — threatening to publish intimate images or private information to obtain money, further images, or any other advantage — is prohibited in every form.

Sexually explicit profile content. Your profile must be suitable for a general audience. You must not use nudity, partial nudity, lingerie or underwear shots, sexual acts, exposed or emphasised genitals, buttocks or breasts, sex toys, fetish material, pornography, or any other sexually explicit or sexually suggestive imagery in your photographs, and you must not use sexually explicit language, sexual propositions or solicitations in your display name, biography, prompt answers or any other part of your profile. The same rule applies to images and links sent in messages: do not send sexual content to anyone on Orthodate, whether or not you believe it is wanted.

Scams. You must not use Orthodate to run any scam or confidence trick. This includes romance and confidence scams; advance-fee, emergency, medical-bill, customs-fee and stranded-traveller stories; cryptocurrency, foreign-exchange, trading, “mentorship” and investment schemes, including so-called pig-butchering; fake or cloned profiles operated to build trust for financial gain; recovery scams aimed at people who have already been defrauded; phishing, credential harvesting and fake verification or “safety check” sites; gift-card, wire-transfer, payment-app and money-mule requests; and any request for money, cryptocurrency, gift cards, bank, card or wallet details, or login credentials, from another member, for any reason whatsoever.

Illegal or fraudulent activity intended to defraud users. You must not use Orthodate to commit, attempt, facilitate or advertise fraud, deception, theft, extortion, identity theft, money laundering, sanctions evasion or any other unlawful activity, and in particular you must not use the service to defraud, deceive or steal from other members or from us. This includes misrepresenting who you are in order to obtain money or property, impersonating another person or organisation, using stolen or unauthorised payment methods, and any other conduct that is unlawful where you are, where the other person is, or where we operate.

Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and aiding or abetting abuse. You must not engage in, attempt, advertise, arrange, recruit for, solicit, finance or in any way further human trafficking or the sexual exploitation of any person, and you must not offer, solicit or arrange commercial sexual services of any kind. You must not aid, abet, facilitate, instruct, encourage, promote or glorify any of the conduct described in this section, or any physical, sexual, emotional, financial or domestic abuse, exploitation, violence, stalking or self-harm, whether against a member, any other person or yourself. Section 5 of our Terms & Conditions sets these rules out in full.

A breach of this section results in immediate and permanent removal without prior warning and without refund. We preserve the relevant records and report the matter to law enforcement and to any other competent authority, in accordance with our Law Enforcement Guidelines. If you encounter any of this on Orthodate, report it through the report control on the profile or conversation, or write to support@orthodate.co. If a person is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first.

In addition to everything in section 3, do not post, upload, send or link to any of the following.

• Nudity, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive imagery, or content whose purpose is sexual gratification, anywhere on the service.
• Threats, incitement to violence, or content glorifying violence, terrorism or self-harm.
• Hate speech or content attacking people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Harassment, bullying, defamation, doxxing, or private information about another person published without their consent.
• Photographs of another person taken or posted without their permission, and photographs of children.
• Material that infringes someone else’s copyright, trade mark or other rights.
• Deceptive synthetic or AI-generated media presented as a genuine photograph of you.
• Malware, phishing links, or anything designed to harm a device or obtain someone’s credentials.

Do not use Orthodate to do any of the following.

• Impersonate another person, or misrepresent your age, name, appearance, marital status, location or identity.
• Create or operate more than one account, or create a new account after we have removed you.
• Ask another member for money, cryptocurrency, gift cards, bank or card details, or an investment of any kind, for any reason.
• Run a romance scam, an advance-fee scheme, a recovery scam, or any other attempt to obtain money or credentials by deception.
• Solicit or arrange commercial sexual services, or engage in human trafficking or exploitation of any kind.
• Aid, abet, facilitate, instruct, encourage, promote or glorify abuse, exploitation, trafficking, violence, stalking or self-harm, whether on Orthodate or anywhere else.
• Threaten, blackmail or extort anyone, including by threatening to publish intimate images or private information, or share intimate images of a person without their consent.
• Advertise, promote, recruit for or fundraise for any product, service, business, cause, campaign or organisation, including by directing members to an external paid channel.
• Send unsolicited bulk or repetitive messages, or use the service to build a marketing list.
• Pressure, coerce or persist in contacting a member who has asked you to stop, blocked you or unmatched you.
• Share, republish or screenshot another member’s photos, messages or personal details outside Orthodate.
• Use another member’s account, or let anyone else use yours.
• File knowingly false reports, or abuse the reporting and verification systems.
• Do anything unlawful, or anything that would put us in breach of a law that applies to us.

Do not do any of the following to the service itself.

• Scrape, crawl, index, harvest or otherwise collect member profiles, photographs or data in bulk, by any means.
• Use bots, scripts, automated clients or any non-public interface to access the service.
• Reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive the source code of any part of the service, except to the extent that law expressly permits it.
• Circumvent, disable or interfere with security features, rate limits, usage allowances, paywalls or moderation controls.
• Probe, scan or test the vulnerability of our systems without our prior written permission, or breach any authentication measure.
• Introduce a virus, worm or other harmful code, or place an unreasonable load on our infrastructure.
• Resell, sublicense or commercially exploit access to the service.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please report it privately to support@orthodate.co before disclosing it anywhere else, and do not access, alter or retain other people’s data while investigating.

Payments on Orthodate are only ever for an Orthodate subscription, made to us and processed by Stripe. Orthodate must not be used to solicit, arrange, advertise or settle any other payment, and in particular must not be used in connection with sexual services, gambling, unlicensed financial services, the sale of controlled or age-restricted goods, money transmission or any attempt to launder funds or evade sanctions.

Do not attempt to pay for a subscription with a payment method that is not yours or that you are not authorised to use. Fraudulent payment attempts and chargeback abuse are treated as a breach of this policy as well as of our Refund Policy.

Every profile and every conversation carries a report control, and reports go to a person rather than to an automated queue. You can also reach us through our contact form or at support@orthodate.co. Tell us who, what and when, and include anything we would need to see it for ourselves.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. We are not an emergency service and cannot respond at that speed.

What we do depends on what happened, whether it was deliberate and whether it has happened before. Depending on the case we may:

• Remove or hide a photograph, an answer or a message.
• Ask you to change something before your profile can be shown again.
• Place the account on hold, which keeps your profile and settings reachable but closes Discover, Likes and Matches until the matter is resolved.
• Remove a verification mark.
• Suspend the account for a period, or close it permanently.
• Cancel a subscription without a refund where the account is closed for a serious breach.
• Report the matter to law enforcement where we believe someone is at risk or a crime has been committed.

Anything in section 3 — child sexual exploitation or abuse, non-consensual content, scams, fraud or other illegal activity aimed at our members, trafficking or exploitation — leads to immediate permanent removal without prior warning and without refund, and we do not owe a warning in any other case either.

A hold does not stay open indefinitely. If your account is placed on hold and the matter is still unresolved 14 days later, the account is closed automatically and you will no longer be able to sign in. We email a reminder about 7 days beforehand. Doing what the hold asked for and sending us one message from the hold page stops this at any point before the deadline. Closure suspends access rather than erasing your data, so we can reverse it if we got it wrong — see the section below.

If your account has been held, suspended or closed and you believe the decision was wrong, reply to the message we sent you or write to support@orthodate.co. A person will look at it again. Tell us what you think we misread — an appeal that adds no information rarely changes an outcome.

Closing an account does not delete the record of why it was closed, and we may keep enough information to stop the same person signing up again.

We may update this policy as the service changes or as new kinds of abuse appear. Material changes are announced in the app or by email before they take effect, and the date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Continuing to use Orthodate after that date means you accept the revised policy.