Safeguarding & Compliance Policy

 Our mission:

At UK Connections Ltd, our top priority is to provide a safe and trusted platform for our community. At its heart, that means operating our platform to advertise in a responsible manner, promoting safety and security, and working collaboratively with partners.

Supporting Influencers and Adult Content 

UK Connections accepts customers using our services to post adverts for a broad range of goods and services, and we know that adult content providers may also use our platform. Adult content work is legal in the UK, and those customers can use online platforms to advertise their services. Nevertheless, we recognise that there are significant risks involved with carrying such adverts, as their presence may lead to those involved in trafficking or exploitation seeking to misuse our platform.

We stand against exploitation in all its forms, and we believe strongly that any business operating in the adult sector has a responsibility to understand and mitigate the risks involved.

We take our responsibilities in this area seriously, and our commitment to user safety and wellbeing includes operating robust safety checks and security measures, as well as working closely with stakeholders such as law enforcement, policy makers, and the voluntary sector. Our transparency reporting policy as set out in our terms of engagement agreement between us and the customer is crystal clear that we operate a zero policy in allowing any form of breach to our commitment to the welfare and safety of those advertisers and the public.

Our safety and security measures:

We have a robust and multi-stage risk assessment process in place for all those customers who use our services to advertise their services through our website. We always aim to, ensure that we are protecting our users and detecting and eradicating illegal or inappropriate use of our platform. We work with charity and law enforcement partners to ensure that we follow best practice as we identify, flag, remove, review, and report illegal or offensive material that may be presented to us to advertise on various national social media platforms. We will immediately report them to the relevant law enforcement authority and block them from ever using our advertisement services.

All adverts are automatically screened for any content that violates our Terms and Conditions or indicates potentially problematic activity. In addition, we maintain a list of prohibited terms and wider risk factors pertaining to potential harm and exploitation, which are regularly updated. We ensure that all adverts are screened for these prohibited terms and risk factors, with a view to identifying and reviewing potentially harmful content.

Advertisers must be 18 years of age or older to purchase any advertisement space on any social media platform regardless or not if the product or service is not age restricted. For clarity is a customer buys an ad package to advertise hairdressers’ services to all age groups, or they are selling organic handmade soaps we would still ensure the customer is over 18 to use our services. We use Yoti, a third-party verification system that includes enhanced phone, email, and age verification, for advertisers on our site who fall into certain higher-risk groups.

We encourage users to report any issues or concerns about adverts directly to the platform they are published on as ultimately; they are the gatekeepers of their own platform and carry out their risk assessment checks on each and every advert we publish with any of our partner platforms, such as Meta, TikTok, Instagram, Gumtree or Vivastreet. You are strongly advised to use the ‘Report this Ad’ feature found on all adverts on every platform as mentioned above, while we also have a feature that allows users to report any concerns of exploitation directly to Unseen, the charity that operates the Modern Slavery Helpline.

UK Connections operates a dedicated process of risk management including our own inhouse moderators, who carry out human moderation on our site, are a crucial part of our ongoing work to combat exploitation. We constantly look for opportunities to learn from the best practice of others and all our customer-facing and compliance staff receive training from a variety of law enforcement agencies, as well as from the specialist charity, “Stop the Traffik.”

Working with law enforcement:

We view cooperation with law enforcement as essential to tackling exploitation, and as such we are open to working closely with police forces in the UK and internationally, and wish to meet any of these agencies such as the National Crime Agency (NCA) where we can offer our assistance.

We proactively report any content that raises suspicions about potential illegality to law enforcement and have a formal referral pathway in place with national policing throughout the UK.

We will provide extensive and detailed supporting witness statements, where these are requested by police, and ensure that an appropriate member of our staff attends court to give witness testimony, where necessary. 

In addition to proactive law enforcement referrals, we also operate a request service, allowing officers to contact us quickly to request information. We undertake to provide information in response to police requests within 48 hours, and we have a mailbox that is monitored 24/7 for police inquiries, so that officers can contact us in relation to cases where they believe there is an imminent threat to safety.

We constantly evaluate our policies, and where we are asked to do so by the police, we take steps to block users identified as high risk.

Working with the charity sector:

We work hard to deepen our understanding of the challenges that our users face, and how we can support them to work in the safest possible manner. We therefore engage closely with a range of adult support groups across the country, as well as other relevant third sector organisations, to ensure that we constantly update our knowledge of the sector and build trust with the community.

Through this work we maintain partnerships with a number of organisations:

We have recently applied for membership of this specialist charity National Ugly Mugs (NUM), providing all our advertisers with free access to NUM support services. We understand that one of the reasons many adult customers use our platform to advertise online is that it provides a safer environment in which to operate and vet clients, and NUM membership gives users access to NUM’s online warning system, as well as help with reporting incidents. Through this partnership adult advertising customers receive alerts on dangerous individuals in and around their location, enabling them to screen clients more effectively.

We value this partnership with NUM extremely highly. Through our work together we look to help those who see the adult entertainment as a positive career choice work as safely as possible, while identifying and supporting those who carry out such services because they face challenging personal circumstances. 

UK Connections works with works in partnership with Unseen, the charity that operates the UK’s Modern Slavery Helpline. UK Connections users can report any concerns about potential exploitation via a ‘Concerns of Exploitation’ button on each advert. Any reports made using this feature go directly to Unseen, who use their experience and expertise in this area to report this issue to the relevant law enforcement body and assist promptly to the issue.

August 2026