Report an abusive linkutm link

1. Report a link

Email [email protected] with "Abuse report" in the subject line. This is our general contact address and it is a real inbox that people read. We do not currently run a separate abuse-only mailbox, so we would rather send you to an address that works than to one that looks official and bounces.

Report anything that breaches our Acceptable Use Policy: phishing and fake sign-in pages, malware, scams, spam, impersonation, harassment, illegal content, or a link whose preview does not match where it actually goes.

2. What to include

The more of this you can give us, the faster we can act. Only the first item is essential.

• The full short link. Copy it exactly, including everything after the final slash. The part after the slash is the link itself, so go.example.com/a7Bx9 and go.example.com are not the same report. Without the full link we usually cannot find it.
• What happened. A couple of sentences is plenty. Where did you receive the link, what did it claim to be, and what did it actually do?
• A screenshot, if you have one safely. A screenshot of the message that carried the link, or of the destination page, tells us more than any description. Do not put yourself at risk to get one, and see section 3 first.
• How it reached you. Email, SMS, WhatsApp, a social post, an ad, a QR code on a poster. This helps us understand the scale.
• Full email headers, if it came by email. Useful, not required. Most mail clients expose these under an option like "Show original".
• Who you are, if you are willing to say. Anonymous reports are welcome and we act on them. But without a reply address we cannot ask you a follow-up question or tell you what we did.
• Whether it is impersonating your brand. If the link imitates your company, say so and tell us your role. That moves it up the queue.

3. What not to do

• Do not click the link to investigate for us. You do not need to confirm anything. Send us the link and let us look at it.
• Do not enter credentials or detailsinto a page you already suspect, even to "test" it with a fake password.
• Do not download or run anything the page offers.
• Do not include your own passwords, card numbers, or one-time codes in your report. We never need them, and we will never ask you for them.
• Do not forward the link to other people to warn them by demonstration. Describe it instead.

4. What happens next

When a report reaches us, this is roughly what we do:

1. We find the link. We match the short link you sent to the account that created it and to the destination it points at.
2. We look at the destination ourselves. We check it in a way that does not require you to have clicked it.
3. We decide whether it breaches the policy. Against the Acceptable Use Policy. Some reports are clear in seconds. Some are genuinely ambiguous, and a marketing campaign you find annoying is not automatically a violation.
4. We act. If it breaches the policy we may disable the link so it stops redirecting, disable the custom domain it runs on, or suspend the account behind it. For phishing and malware we disable first and ask questions after.
5. We look for the rest of it. Abuse is rarely one link. We check whether the same account or the same destination is behind others.
6. We reply, if you left an address. We will tell you what we decided, including when we decided to do nothing.

Where we are legally required to, or where we believe someone is at risk of serious harm, we may also preserve information and share it with law enforcement or another competent authority.

5. What to expect from us

We will be straight with you rather than quote you a number we cannot stand behind.

linkutm is a small team. We do not have a published response time for abuse reports, and we are not going to invent one here just because it would read better. What we can tell you honestly: we review reports as quickly as we can, we treat active phishing and malware as the most urgent thing in the queue, and reports that arrive with the full short link get handled faster than reports we have to go back and ask questions about.

Some things we will not promise:

• That every report gets an individual reply. We aim to reply when you leave an address, and reports that need a follow-up question always get one.
• That we will agree with you. Sometimes we look and conclude the link is within policy.
• That we can tell you what we did about a specific account. We will not share another user's account details with you.
• That disabling a link undoes the harm. If the same content is reachable by other routes, only the host of that content can take it down.

If a report is urgent and you have not heard back, send it again and say it is a resend. That is not a nuisance, it is useful signal.

6. If someone is in danger

We are a link management company, not an emergency service, and we do not monitor this inbox around the clock. If a link involves a credible threat to someone's life or safety, contact your local emergency services or police first. Report it to us as well, and say clearly in the subject line that it is urgent, but please do not let us be the only people who know.

7. If you already clicked

Plenty of people report a link after clicking it. That is normal and it is not something to feel foolish about. These scams are built by people who do this full time. Report the link to us, and separately consider:

• If you entered a password, change it now, and change it anywhere else you reused it.
• If you entered card or bank details, contact your bank or card issuer.
• If you downloaded or ran something, treat the device as compromised until you or someone you trust has checked it.
• If it was a work account, tell your IT or security team, even if you think nothing happened.

We can disable the link. We cannot undo what a phishing page already captured, so the steps above matter more than our part does, and they matter sooner.

8. Copyright, legal, and law enforcement

Copyright and trademark

If a linkutm link points to material that infringes your copyright or trademark, email [email protected] with the full short link, a description of the work, and your relationship to the rights holder. Note that we host the redirect, not the content. Taking the link down does not remove the material, so you will usually also need to approach whoever hosts it.

Law enforcement

Law enforcement and regulators can reach us at the same address. Send your request on official letterhead from an official address, describe the legal basis, and identify the links precisely. We respond to requests we are legally required to respond to. We will not describe the scope of what we hold, or the process we follow, on a public page.

Privacy and your data

Questions about what we collect, or requests to access or delete your data, are covered in our Privacy Policy.

9. If your own link was disabled

This page is for reporting other people's links. If we disabled one of yours and you think we got it wrong, that is an appeal, and it is covered in section 15 of the Acceptable Use Policy. We do reverse decisions when we are shown we were wrong.

10. Contact

Email: [email protected]

Email is much faster than post for anything time-sensitive.