Questions people ask.

Hold is a two-sided trust check for peer-to-peer internet transactions. Before you send money to a stranger online, both of you share a Handshake link and check each other.

If they won't click the handshake, that's your answer.

1. You paste the other party's public profile or listing URL at /h/new.
2. Hold investigates them — account age, cross-platform presence, scam-report matches.
3. You get a shareable link. You send it to the other party.
4. They open it, paste your URL back, and see what Hold found on you.
5. Both of you acknowledge. A timestamped receipt is issued. You proceed with the transaction.

Hold currently supports public URLs from:

• Reddit — user profiles (reddit.com/u/username) and specific post URLs
• X / Twitter — profiles (x.com/username) and individual posts
• Facebook Marketplace — item listings and seller profiles
• Facebook profiles — public profiles

You can also paste a plain username — u/spez or@elonmusk — and Hold will figure out the platform.

Craigslist, Depop, eBay, Mercari, OfferUp, Whatnot, StockX, and other specialty marketplaces are on the roadmap but not live today. If you paste a URL from one of those, Hold won't recognize the platform.

If you're trading on one of these and want it supported, email hello@sendhold.link — we prioritize based on real user demand.

No. Hold is not a background check and not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681). Do not use Hold reports for employment, credit, insurance, housing, or any other FCRA-covered decision.

Hold is an AI-generated estimate based on public information. It may be wrong. It is not verified. It is an informed starting point for a peer-to-peer transaction — nothing more.

Only the two transaction parties see the full scored report. That's cookie-gated in your browser.

Anyone else who lands on the Handshake URL — someone it got forwarded to, a crawler, a screenshotter — sees only status ("waiting / both complete / expired"). No score, no names.

For each handshake: the URLs submitted, the AI-generated report, session cookies, and a coarse device/source hint. No names, no emails, no passwords (there's no signup).

Handshake records expire and are deleted after 30 days. See the Privacy Policy for details.

Go to hold's dispute page and submit the form. You can request deletion, correction, or flag that a scan was wrong.

We respond within 7 days.

You can screenshot your own receipt. It's your speech. But re-publishing the Handshake link in a public forum won't expose scores — non-parties see status only.

It's an estimate. Hold uses Perplexity's Agent API to investigate: it cross-searches the web, fetches pages, looks for scam-database matches, and reasons across the evidence. When there's good public signal (account age, trade history, reported scams), the score is meaningful. When someone is a ghost online, Hold will honestly say it couldn't establish much.

We'll publish accuracy stats at hold's stats page as we collect outcome data from real users.

• GREEN — evidence of legitimacy. Account has history, cross-platform presence, no adverse flags.
• AMBER — mixed evidence. Proceed, but with normal caution.
• RED — adverse evidence found. New accounts with no history, refusals of standard payment protections, name matches in scam databases, or coordination with other flagged accounts.

That's a signal. Legitimate sellers want the deal to happen. They'll click a 10-second check because it reduces their risk too. Scammers don't want attention — so they find reasons not to.

"If they won't click the handshake, that's your answer" is the product in one sentence.