Terms of service

1. About these terms

Trace Bureau is a trading name of Bureau Nine Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales ("we", "us", "our"). Our registered details are on the company details page. These terms, together with our privacy notice, are the whole agreement between you and us for every instruction placed through tracebureau.co.uk, the firm portal, bulk upload or the API, and for every report, result or other information we give you.

"You" means the person or organisation instructing us. If you instruct us for a firm or company, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and "you" includes it. "The person" means the individual you ask us to find. "A result" means any address, contact detail or other information we give you about the person, including the reasons for a no-find.

You accept these terms when you tick the declaration on the instruction form, open a firm account, or send us an instruction by any route. If you do not accept them, do not instruct us. If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights.

2. Who may instruct us

You must be at least 18. You must instruct us in your own name, or in the name of an organisation you are authorised to act for, and give us a genuine name, postal address and email address at which we can reach you. If you are acting for someone else, such as a client, you must tell us who they are and confirm that they have a lawful purpose.

We may ask you at any time, before we start or before we release a result, to prove your identity (for example with photo identification) and your purpose (for example an invoice, a tenancy agreement, court papers or a grant of probate). If you do not, we may decline the instruction or withhold the result, and nothing is charged.

3. Your declaration

Every instruction, however it reaches us, includes the following declaration. You make it to us, we rely on it in deciding whether to act, and we keep a record of it.

1. Everything you have told us about yourself, about the person and about your reason is true, accurate and complete to the best of your knowledge, and you have not left out anything that might affect our decision to act.
2. The reason you have given is your real and only reason for wanting the address.
3. You have a lawful basis for obtaining and using the address for that reason.
4. You will use the result only for that reason, keep it confidential and comply with section 7.
5. Your purpose is not one of the prohibited purposes in section 4.
6. No court order, injunction, bail condition, undertaking or agreement prevents you from contacting, locating or approaching the person, and the person has not told you, the police or a court that they do not want contact from you. If either of those is not the case, you have told us so, and your purpose is legal proceedings or another purpose the law permits.
7. You are not acting for anyone you have not told us about.
8. You understand that we record this declaration with the date, time and network address from which it was made, that we may check it, and that we may give it to the police, the Information Commissioner's Office, a regulator or a court.

If you hold a firm account, you make this declaration for every instruction placed on the account, by any of your users, by bulk upload or through your API key, whether or not a box is ticked at the time.

4. Purposes we refuse

We do not trace, and you must not instruct us:

• To find someone who has a non-molestation order, restraining order, stalking protection order, injunction, bail condition or any other order in place against you, or who has told you, the police or a court that they do not want contact from you.
• To find a partner, former partner, family member or anyone else for a personal reason, unless it is a consent-based reconnection, where we pass on a message and share nothing without the person's agreement.
• To harass, stalk, threaten, intimidate, coerce, embarrass or cause distress to any person, or to turn up at their home uninvited.
• To find a child, or a person under the care or protection of the state, other than through a solicitor or a court.
• On behalf of someone you have not told us about, or for a purpose other than the one you have declared.
• To publish, sell or share the address, to add it to any list, database or product, or for marketing of any kind.
• Anything unlawful, or anything for which we cannot record a lawful basis.

We also refuse any instruction where the instructing party will not identify themselves or verify their identity, and any purpose for which we cannot record a lawful basis.

5. Vetting, refusal, cancellation and reporting

A person reads every instruction before work starts. We may decline any instruction, at any stage including after an address has been found, at our sole discretion and without giving reasons. A declined instruction is not charged; a cancellation is free before work starts and carries the work-started fee in section 8 once the trace is under way. We may ask you questions, ask for documents, and check what you tell us against other information.

Where we consider that a person may be at risk, we may contact them, warn them or notify the police, and we may withhold a result without telling you why. We keep records of every instruction, including declined ones. We cooperate with the police, the Information Commissioner's Office, regulators and the courts, and we may disclose your identity, your instruction and your declaration to them, and to the person where the law requires it.

6. The service and what a result means

We attempt to establish the current registered United Kingdom residential address of the person you identify. A report states the address at which that person is registered according to the records we checked on the date shown, with a confidence rating: Confirmed (two or more independent current records agree), Probable (strong evidence from one current record with supporting indicators) or Possible (the best available lead, to be treated as a lead and not as a confirmed address).

A registered address is where records place the person. It is usually, but not always, where they live, and records compiled by others can be out of date or wrong. We do not guarantee that the person lives at the address, that they will be there on any date, or that anything sent or delivered there will reach them. Before you rely on a result, and in particular before you serve documents, start proceedings, instruct enforcement agents or visit the address, you must satisfy yourself that it is right. That is your responsibility, not ours.

We do not guarantee a result. We do not give legal advice: whether an address is good for service, whether you may contact the person, and what you may lawfully do with an address are for you to decide, with your own advisers. We do not contact the person we trace, except in consent-based reconnection cases and where an executor, administrator or probate solicitor asks us to pass on their letter to a beneficiary we have found, in which case we deliver the letter and report that it was delivered. We do not collect money, serve documents, carry out surveillance or give opinions on a person's character or means. We do not disclose our sources or methods.

7. Confidentiality and permitted use of a result

A result is given to you in confidence, for the purpose you declared and no other. You must:

• use it only for that purpose, and only for the matter you told us about;
• keep it confidential. You may share it with your solicitor, process server, enforcement agent or other professional acting for you on the same matter, and you are responsible for their use of it. You must not share it with anyone else;
• not publish it, post it online, put it in any list, database or product, sell it, or use it for marketing;
• not attend the address to confront, threaten or intimidate the person. Where your purpose requires a visit, for example service of documents or a lawful enforcement visit, it must be carried out lawfully and, where the law requires, by a person authorised to do it;
• not use it once your purpose has been achieved, and delete it when you no longer need it for that purpose;
• not use it in breach of any court order, undertaking or agreement.

Once we deliver a result, you are a data controller for it under UK GDPR. You are responsible for handling it lawfully, keeping it secure, keeping it no longer than you need it, and dealing with any request the person makes to you about it. The same restrictions apply to anything else we tell you in the course of an instruction, including the reasons for a no-find.

8. Payment

Card details are captured at instruction and held by our payment provider; we never see full card numbers. We charge the card only when we deliver a Confirmed or Probable result, and the report is released on successful payment. A Possible result is offered at 50% of the fee, which you may accept or decline; nothing is charged unless you accept it. If a saved card cannot be charged, we send a payment link and release the report on payment; the result is held for 30 days. Nothing is charged for a no-find, a declined instruction or an instruction you cancel before work starts. Two endings carry a work-started fee of £60 in place of the trace fee, charged to the saved card (or added to a firm account's invoice) when the case closes: an instruction you cancel after we have told you the trace is in progress, because the searches have by then been run and paid for; and a consent-based reconnection where we find the person and pass on your message but they decline or do not reply to our two approaches. In both cases the fee is for the work done, no address is delivered, and the full trace fee is not charged. Because nothing is charged until a result is delivered or the work-started fee falls due, fees once charged are not refundable. The price shown when you instruct applies to that instruction; prices are on the pricing page and include VAT where applicable. The private-client prices apply only to an individual instructing for themselves. If you instruct for an organisation or for a client, or in the course of a business or profession, the professional prices apply whichever option you chose on the form; if an instruction has been placed on the wrong list we will tell you and re-price it before work starts, and you may cancel at no charge.

If you dispute a charge for a delivered result with your bank or card provider, we will give the provider our record of the instruction, your declaration, your acceptance of these terms and the delivery. The fee for a delivered result remains due whatever the outcome of the dispute, and we may recover it together with our reasonable costs of doing so.

9. Your right to cancel

If you are a consumer, you have the right to cancel within 14 days of instructing us under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. When you tick the declaration you ask us to begin work at once, within that period, and you acknowledge that you lose the right to cancel once the service has been fully performed, which is when a result is delivered to you.

You may cancel at any time before a result is delivered by emailing [email protected] with your reference or, on a personal instruction, through the message box on your tracking page. Cancelling before work starts (while your instruction shows as received or being checked) costs nothing. Once we have told you the trace is in progress, the searches have been run and paid for, and because you asked us to begin at once you pay the work-started fee of £60 in section 8 for the work done up to your cancellation; the full trace fee is not charged. Once a result is delivered the service is complete, the fee is due and the right to cancel has ended. You may use the cancellation form at the end of these terms, but you do not have to.

10. Firm accounts, bulk upload and API

Firm accounts are invoiced monthly for cases delivered in the month and for any work-started fee under section 8, on 14-day terms, with each case shown against the reference supplied. A Possible result delivered to a firm account is invoiced at 50% of the fee. We may charge interest and compensation on late payment under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, and may suspend the account while an invoice is overdue.

Instructions placed by any person the firm allows to sign in, by bulk upload or through the firm's API key are the firm's instructions. The firm makes the declaration in section 3 for each of them, and is responsible for ensuring that each user has, and has recorded on their own file, a lawful basis for the trace. The firm is responsible for keeping sign-in emails and API keys secure, for everything done with them, and for telling us at once when someone leaves or a key may have been compromised. A result delivered to the account may be used only for the matter identified by the reference on the instruction.

11. Timing

Standard and Account traces are delivered within 5 working days of acceptance and Priority traces within 3 working days. A 24-hour trace, when we offer it, is delivered within 24 hours of acceptance. These are targets, not guarantees. Delays caused by missing or inaccurate information from you, by our verification checks, or by events outside our reasonable control extend them, and we will tell you if we expect to miss a target. Because nothing is charged until a result is delivered, delay does not give rise to any refund or to any liability on our part beyond section 13.

12. Data protection

We process personal data as a data controller under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and we are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office. Our privacy notice explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it and who we share it with. We record a lawful basis and a legitimate interests assessment for every instruction. You confirm that you are entitled to give us the information you provide about the person. If the person exercises their right of access, we may be required by law to tell them that their data was disclosed to you; we will withhold your details where the law allows and where disclosure would prejudice your legal rights.

13. Our liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be excluded or limited by law, and nothing affects a consumer's statutory rights, including the right to have a service performed with reasonable care and skill.

Subject to that:

• We are not liable for anything you, or anyone you give a result to, do or fail to do with it, or for any claim made against you arising from your use of it.
• We are not liable for loss caused by inaccuracies in the records we consult, which are compiled by others, by the person having moved, or by anything sent to the address not reaching them.
• We are not liable for any decision, action, proceedings, service, enforcement step, visit or expenditure you make in reliance on a result.
• We are not liable for delay, for a no-find, or for declining or cancelling an instruction.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, business, opportunity or goodwill, wasted costs, or the costs of proceedings, even if we were told they might arise.
• Our total liability to you for an instruction, however it arises, is limited to the fee you paid for that instruction.

If you are a business, the service is supplied without any implied term as to quality or fitness for purpose beyond what these terms say, and you must tell us about any claim within twelve months of the result being delivered.

14. Your responsibility to us

You will compensate us in full for any loss, damage, claim, fine, penalty, cost or expense, including reasonable legal costs, that we suffer or incur because of:

• a false, inaccurate or misleading statement in your instruction or your declaration;
• your use, or the use by anyone you gave it to, of a result in breach of these terms or of the law;
• any other breach of these terms by you or by any user of your firm account; or
• any claim made against us by the person or by anyone else arising from your instruction or your use of a result.

If you are a consumer, this applies to losses that are a foreseeable result of your breach.

15. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close your access to the instruction form, the portal or the API, decline future instructions and cancel instructions in progress if we reasonably believe you have breached these terms, given a false declaration, misused a result or failed to pay, or if we are required to do so by law or by a regulator. Sections 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17 continue to apply after an instruction ends, however it ends.

16. Complaints, disputes and law

If something has gone wrong, email [email protected] with your reference. We acknowledge complaints within two working days and aim to respond fully within 14 days. We are not required to use, and do not currently use, an alternative dispute resolution scheme. Complaints about personal data can also go to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your local courts, and you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protection of the law where you live.

17. General

We may change these terms. The version you accepted applies to that instruction; the current version applies to new instructions, and firm account holders receive at least 14 days' notice by email of material changes. If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest remains in force. A delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms to anyone else; we may transfer ours to a successor to our business and will tell you if we do. Notices to you are sent to the email address you gave us. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

Cancellation form

For consumers who wish to cancel before a result is delivered. Using this form is optional; an email with your reference is enough.