Terms of Use

About these terms

Belayat is a service of Twakka Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 14001176). Our registered office is 167–169 Great Portland Street, Fifth Floor, London W1W 5PF. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean Twakka Ltd. "You" means the person using Belayat.

These terms apply when you use the Belayat app, app.belayat.uk or belayat.uk. They include our Community Guidelines, which say what you can and cannot post. Our Privacy Notice explains what we do with your personal data. If you buy advertising, the Advertiser Terms also apply.

You can contact us about anything at support@belayat.uk.

Who can use Belayat

Anyone can browse Belayat without an account. To have an account, you must:

• be 18 or over (we ask for your date of birth the first time you sign in)
• live in the UK
• use Belayat for yourself, or for a business or organisation you are allowed to act for
• not have been banned from Belayat before

To post, message or reply, you also need to verify a UK mobile number once. One mobile number can belong to one active account at a time.

Your account

You sign in with Apple, with Google, or with a code we email to you. We do not ask for a password. Keep your sign-in and your phone secure, because anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Tell us straight away at support@belayat.uk if you think someone else is using it.

• Have one account only. Do not share it, sell it or let someone else use it.
• Tell the truth about yourself, including your age.
• Do not use someone else’s name, photo or phone number.

What Belayat is, and what it is not

Belayat is a noticeboard. It helps people in the UK Nepali community find rooms, jobs, things for sale, events and notices near them, and talk to each other.

We are not a party to any deal you make. We are not the landlord, the employer, the buyer or the seller. We do not handle payments between people, and we do not hold deposits. We do not inspect rooms, interview employers or check items. Any agreement is between you and the other person.

Most posts are not checked by a person before they appear. Some are, as the Community Guidelines explain. A badge such as "Verified landlord" means only what its label says we checked. It is not a promise about the person.

Belayat has no reviews or ratings of people or businesses. Please follow the safety advice in the app, and see a room or meet an employer before you pay anything.

Your posts and messages

You own what you post. To run Belayat we need your permission to use it. So you give us a free, non-exclusive licence to host, store, copy, show, resize, format and share your posts, photos and messages. We use it:

• to show your posts in the app and on belayat.uk, including to search engines such as Google, so people can find them
• to deliver your messages to the people you send them to
• to check content for safety and for the law, as described below
• to show your public posts when we promote Belayat, for example in a daily jobs email

The licence lasts until your content is deleted from Belayat. After that, copies may stay in our backups for a short time, and in moderation records as the Privacy Notice explains.

When you post, you promise that:

• what you post is true, and the room, job, item or event is real and available
• you are allowed to offer it
• you own your photos and words, or have permission to use them
• your post follows the law and the Community Guidelines

The rules

The Community Guidelines are part of these terms. In short, you must not use Belayat to:

• scam, defraud or mislead anyone
• post anything illegal, or offer anything illegal
• charge a job seeker for work, a visa or a Certificate of Sponsorship
• exclude people from a room or job because of children, benefits or a protected characteristic, such as race, religion, sex, disability or age
• harass, threaten or bully anyone, or post hate
• post sexual content, or look for dates
• share someone else’s personal details without their permission
• spam, post the same thing many times, or run more than one account
• come back after a ban
• copy, scrape or collect data from Belayat, or disrupt it or try to get around its security

Checks when you post

Before a post appears, Belayat checks it automatically against the posting rules. A post that breaks a rule cannot be published until you change it. We tell you what to change and why. Some posts are held until a person has checked them, for example the first room an account offers, and jobs that mention visa sponsorship.

Posts end after a set time unless you renew them. You can close, pause or delete your own posts at any time.

Messages

Messages happen inside the app. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. Belayat checks messages automatically for common scam patterns, and our moderators can read a conversation when it is reported, when a check flags it, or when we look into a safety concern. We do this to keep people safe from scams and abuse. The Privacy Notice explains more.

For new accounts, phone numbers and email addresses in the first two messages of a conversation are hidden. This keeps early conversations where we can help if something goes wrong.

How we deal with illegal and harmful content

Belayat is a user-to-user service under the Online Safety Act 2023. We take proportionate steps to stop illegal content appearing, and to remove it quickly when we find it or are told about it. We treat fraud, scams, illegal recruitment fees and immigration crime as the biggest risks on Belayat.

To do this we use:

• automatic checks at posting, which block or hold posts that break the rules
• automatic risk checks on posts and messages, including an AI tool, which help our moderators decide what to look at first
• reports from people who use Belayat, and from people who do not
• human moderators, who make every decision about an account

The only decision taken without a person is removing obvious spam from a brand-new account. You can appeal it, and a person will look at it.

We may pass information to the police, Action Fraud, the National Crime Agency or another authority when the law requires it, or when we believe someone is at risk of serious harm. We report child sexual abuse material to the National Crime Agency.

Reporting

You can report any post, profile, message or comment in the app. Anyone can report a post on belayat.uk without an account. You can also email support@belayat.uk. You can block anyone, and they will not be able to message you.

Every report gets a case number. We aim to review every report within 24 hours, and scam reports sooner. If several people report the same post, we may hide it until we have looked at it. We do not tell the person you reported who you are.

What happens if the rules are broken

Depending on what happened, we may:

• ask you to change a post before it goes live
• hide or remove a post, message or comment
• give your account a warning
• stop your account posting, messaging and voting for 30 days, while you can still browse and read your messages
• ban your account, and block the mobile number and device used with it so they cannot be used for a new account

Usually we go one step at a time: a warning, then a 30-day suspension, then a ban. For serious harm, such as a scam, a threat or illegal content, we may ban an account straight away. If we remove a post for a scam, we may warn the people who messaged about it.

When we act on your content or account, we tell you what we did, why, which rule it breaks and how to appeal. The only exception is where telling you would break the law or put someone at risk.

Complaints and appeals

If you think we got a decision wrong, you can appeal it once, from the notice we sent you. A different person reviews it where we can. We usually answer within 24 hours. If the appeal succeeds, we put your content or account back.

You can also complain to us, by emailing support@belayat.uk, about:

• illegal content you have seen on Belayat
• a post or account we removed, restricted or banned, including your own
• the way we used automatic checks on your content
• anything you think we are doing wrong under the Online Safety Act 2023, or these terms

You do not need an account to complain. We reply to every complaint. We aim to answer within 24 hours, and we tell you if it will take longer. We tell you what we decided and why, and we put it right if we got something wrong. Complaints about how we use personal data are covered in the Privacy Notice.

Ofcom regulates online safety in the UK. It does not decide individual complaints, but you can tell it about a concern at ofcom.org.uk.

Featured and Sponsored

Businesses can pay to show a job, an event or an advert in a reserved space. These are always labelled "Featured" or "Sponsored", with a "Why am I seeing this?" link. Paying never changes the order of ordinary results. Nobody can pay to promote a room or any other Housing post.

Advertising is sold only on belayat.uk. The app shows no prices and sells nothing.

Our service

Belayat is free to use. We work to keep it running and safe, but we cannot promise it will always be available or free of faults. We may change, add or remove features. If we plan to close Belayat, we will tell you at least 30 days before, so you can save anything you need.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time in the app, in Me, then Delete my account. You can also do it on the web at belayat.uk/delete-account. Deletion is real: it is not a pause. If you signed in with Apple, we also tell Apple to disconnect Belayat. The Privacy Notice explains what we delete and the little we must keep.

We may close an account that breaks these terms, as explained above. We also delete an account that has not been used for 3 years. We email you a warning at least 30 days before. If we have no working email address for you, we cannot warn you, and the account is deleted without a warning.

Our responsibility to you

If we break these terms or fail to use reasonable care and skill, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that was a foreseeable result. Loss is foreseeable if it was obvious it would happen, or if we both knew it might happen when you started using Belayat.

Nothing in these terms limits our responsibility for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. Nothing here affects your legal rights as a consumer.

We are not responsible for:

• what other people post or say, or what they do, unless we failed to act as these terms say we will
• any deal between you and another person, including money you pay them
• loss that was not foreseeable
• business losses, such as lost profit or lost business opportunity, because Belayat is provided for personal use
• events outside our reasonable control

If you use the app from Apple or Google

These terms are between you and us, not Apple or Google. We, not Apple or Google, are responsible for the app and its content, support and maintenance, and for dealing with any claim about it. If you downloaded the app from Apple’s App Store, Apple and its subsidiaries can enforce these terms as they apply to your use of the app, and the App Store’s usage rules also apply.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example when the law changes or we add a feature. We will tell you in the app at least 30 days before an important change takes effect, unless we must change sooner for legal or safety reasons. The date and version at the top show which version you are reading.

When the terms change, we ask you to read and accept the new version before your next post. If you do not agree, you can stop using Belayat and delete your account.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and you can bring a claim in the courts of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland, you can also bring a claim in Scotland, and if you live in Northern Ireland, in Northern Ireland. Wherever you live in the UK, you keep the protections of your local consumer law.

Other things you should know

• If a court decides that part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we do not enforce a term straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• We may transfer this agreement to another organisation that takes over Belayat. We will tell you, and your rights will not be reduced. You cannot transfer your account.
• Nobody else has rights under these terms, except Apple as described above.