Trust & safety

Report a link

A short link hides where it goes, which is exactly what makes one worth reporting. If a Paddek link led somewhere harmful, tell us here. You do not need an account and you do not need to identify yourself.

Report

Tell us what you found

Four fields, one of them required. The more precisely you describe the destination, the faster a reviewer can act on it.

What happens after you report

It is recorded immediately
Every report is written to the abuse queue and you get a reference straight away. Nothing is filtered out before a person sees it.
A person reviews it against the policy
A reviewer checks the destination and decides whether it breaches the Acceptable Use Policy. Phishing, malware and child safety are triaged ahead of everything else.
Repeat reports flag a link automatically
When several independent reports name the same link it is marked suspicious and visitors see a warning before they continue. It still resolves — a machine flags, a human decides on a takedown.
Enforcement matches the harm
A warning, a disabled link, a suspended account, a terminated account, or a referral to the authorities. A disabled link returns a page explaining it is gone; it is never quietly pointed somewhere else.

The full ladder is set out in the Acceptable Use Policy.

What to expect

You will not hear whether the link exists: The confirmation is identical for a live link, a deleted one, a link on a domain we do not host and a string that is not a URL. That is deliberate: an endpoint that answers "is this short link real?" is a reconnaissance tool, and one that names the owner turns reporting into harassment.
No response-time commitment: Reports are read by people, and we are not going to publish a service level we have not committed to. What we can say is the ordering: active harm first, everything else in turn.
You will usually not get a follow-up: If you leave an email address we may write to ask a question about your report. We do not send a resolution notice, because telling a reporter what happened to a link tells them something about the account behind it.
Your details stay with us: Your email address, if you give one, is never shown to the account that owns the link. Your IP address is not stored — only a salted hash of it, so a flood of reports from one source can be recognised.

Other channels

[email protected]: For reports that need attachments or back-and-forth, and for appeals against an enforcement action.
[email protected]: For a vulnerability in the platform itself rather than a link carried on it.
[email protected]: For access, correction and deletion requests about your own data.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. This form is not monitored around the clock.

Own the link?

When a link is flagged or disabled after a report, we email the account it belongs to, naming the link and the category reported. If you think we misread it, reply to that notice or write to [email protected] from the address on the account. Appeals are reviewed by someone other than whoever took the original action — see Appeals.