Legal

Acceptable Use Policy

Effective 14 July 2026 · Forms part of the Terms of Service

LotMaster puts a bidding record and a payment link into your WhatsApp group. That is a lot of trust to hand to someone we have not met. This policy is the short list of things that will get that trust withdrawn — what you may not auction, what you may not do to a bidder, and what you may not do to our payment rails. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

1. Who this binds

This policy binds you, the seller — the person or business holding a LotMaster account and running auctions in your own WhatsApp groups. It forms part of the Terms of Service, and breaking it is a breach of them.

You are also responsible for the conduct of anyone you let into a group you have registered with us, and for anyone you invite onto your account as a team member. You cannot outsource a breach of this policy to a colleague.

2. You are the auctioneer. We are not.

This is the most important sentence in this document, so it gets its own section. LotMaster is software. You are the seller of record and the auctioneer. We do not own the goods, set the reserve, admit the bidders, hold the stock, or take possession of the proceeds. You do all of that, and the law that applies to auctions in South Africa applies to you.

That means you are responsible for holding whatever licence, registration or accreditation your kind of auction requires, and for keeping it current. Which one that is depends on what you sell. Common ones in South Africa:

• Second-hand goods — dealers and auctioneers must register with the SAPS under the Second-Hand Goods Act, 2009.
• Property — a Fidelity Fund Certificate from the Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority (PPRA).
• Livestock — registration as an agricultural produce or livestock agent with the Agricultural Produce Agents Council (APAC).
• Precious metals and rough diamonds — a permit or licence under the Precious Metals Act or the Diamonds Act.
• All auctions — the duties the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 (section 45) and the Auction Regulations, 2011 place on every auctioneer: published rules of auction, an auction register, honest disclosure of whether a lot carries a reserve, and no mock auctions.

We may ask you to show us that licence, and we may switch off payments until you do. That is not us being difficult; it is the condition on which we are allowed to put a pay link into your group at all.

3. What you may not auction

Nothing on this list may be listed, bid on, or paid for through LotMaster, whatever the law says where your buyer happens to be:

• Anything stolen, or anything you cannot show good title to.
• Firearms, ammunition, explosives and weapons — including parts and components. Firearms in South Africa are transferred through a licensed dealer under the Firearms Control Act. A WhatsApp group is not that, and we will not pretend it is.
• Drugs — illegal narcotics, precursors, and prescription medicines. Also unlicensed supplements and anything making a medical claim it cannot keep.
• Protected and endangered wildlife — live animals, rhino horn, ivory, skins, trophies or derivatives traded contrary to NEMBA or CITES.
• Counterfeit and infringing goods — replicas, fakes, and anything that breaches someone else's trade mark or copyright under the Counterfeit Goods Act.
• Human remains, body parts, tissue and bodily fluids.
• Hazardous, radioactive and regulated chemical materials.
• Adult and sexual content or services, and anything involving a minor.
• Alcohol and tobacco, unless you hold the licence that lets you sell it and you are enforcing the age limit yourself.
• Financial instruments — securities, shares, forex, crypto assets, and anything that is really an investment scheme wearing an auction costume.
• Personal information — databases, contact lists, or scraped WhatsApp numbers. Yours or anyone else's.
• Anything else that is simply illegal to sell in South Africa. The list above is not exhaustive and is not a loophole map.

4. How you may not run an auction

The product exists to make a result checkable. These are the ways of making it a lie:

• Shill bidding. No bidding on your own lot, and no arranging for anyone else to bid it up on your behalf. This is not merely against our rules — section 45(3) of the Consumer Protection Act makes it unlawful, and the audit trail we keep is exactly the sort of record that would prove it.
• Mock auctions — running an auction you never intended to honour, or refusing to sell to the genuine highest bidder because you did not like the number.
• Bid rigging and collusion with other sellers or with bidders, including any arrangement to suppress bids. The Competition Act is not on your side here.
• Hidden reserves and moving goalposts. If a lot has a reserve, say so. Do not invent one after the bidding closes because the price disappointed you.
• Undisclosed premiums and charges. If you switch on buyer-pays-fees, that premium is a charge to your buyer and it belongs in your published rules of auction, before the bidding, not as a surprise on the invoice.
• Lying about a lot — its condition, provenance, mileage, age, or whether it exists at all.
• Taking the money and not delivering. A winning bid is a contract. Honour it.
• Tampering with the record — editing, faking or misrepresenting a result page, an invoice, or a bid trail, or presenting one as verified when you have altered it.
• Punishing a bidder dishonestly — marking a buyer as a defaulter who in fact paid you, or as leverage in a dispute.

5. What you may not do with our payments

When you turn on online payment, a pay link goes out under our payment processor's licence. Abusing it puts every other seller on this platform at risk, so it is the fastest way off it. You may not:

• Process payments that are not your own genuine auction sales. Your payment account is for the lots you auction on LotMaster. It is not a payment terminal to rent out, to lend to a friend, or to run someone else's business through. This is called transaction laundering and it is the single thing that gets a platform shut down.
• Launder money, structure payments to dodge reporting, or move the proceeds of crime — including by auctioning a lot to yourself, or to an accomplice, to give dirty money a clean receipt.
• Test or run stolen cards, or knowingly accept payment from one.
• Finance anything sanctioned or terrorist-related.
• Deceive a buyer into paying — fake lots, phantom stock, invoices for auctions that never ran, or a pay link sent to someone who did not win.
• Take payment for a category you told us you do not sell, or for goods in section 3.
• Give false banking or business details, or route settlement to an account that is not yours.

6. What you may not do to the people in your group

• Do not add the bot to a group whose members have not agreed to be in an auction. They will be bidding on a record. They should know that.
• Do not harvest the group. The numbers in your group were given to you to run an auction, not to build a marketing list, and not to sell on. POPIA applies to you as much as it applies to us — see our Privacy Policy, which explains that for your bidders you are the responsible party and we are merely your operator.
• No spam, harassment, hate speech, threats or intimidation, in the group or in the DMs the bot sends on your behalf.
• Do not use the bot to message people who never joined your group.

7. What you may not do to the platform

• No attempt to break, probe, overload or reverse-engineer LotMaster, and no attempt to reach another seller's data.
• No sharing your sign-in link or letting someone use your account as their own. Invite them as a team member instead.
• No working around the limits of your plan, and no falsifying your plan, seat count or business details to get a cheaper rate on the money we take.
• No scraping, resale or white-labelling of LotMaster without our written agreement.
• No pretending to be LotMaster to your bidders, or implying we vouch for your goods. We vouch for the record of the bidding. Nothing else.

8. What we do about a breach — and what we honestly cannot do

Depending on what we find, we may: ask you to explain; ask you for proof of licence or identity; suspend your ability to take payments; suspend your groups; close your account; keep the audit trail; and report you to the SAPS, the Information Regulator, the National Consumer Commission, or our payment processor. For anything on the money-laundering or stolen-goods end of section 3 or section 5, we will not warn you first.

Now the part most platforms leave out. We cannot freeze or claw back a payment that has already settled. LotMaster deliberately never holds your money: our processor settles the hammer price straight from the buyer into your own bank account, and takes our fee in the same movement. That design is what keeps us out of the money path — but it also means the only lever we truly have is stopping the next payment, not reversing the last one. If you have defrauded a buyer, the recourse that will actually recover their money is a chargeback through their bank and a case with the SAPS. We will hand over the bid trail, the invoice and the payment reference to support either, and the record is designed to be unhelpful to you and useful to them.

9. Disputes between a seller and a bidder

A dispute about the goods — condition, delivery, non-payment, a lot that never arrived — is between you and your buyer. You are the seller; we did not sell anything. What we will do is produce the record: the bid trail with WhatsApp's own server timestamps, the invoice, and the payment status. That record is the same one for both of you, and we will not edit it to favour whoever asks us first.

A buyer who believes they were defrauded should raise it with you, then with their bank, and may write to us athello@lotmasterhq.com. Under the Consumer Protection Act they may also approach the National Consumer Commission. Where a seller shows a pattern of disputes we treat it as a breach of this policy in its own right.

10. Reporting abuse

If you have seen a LotMaster seller doing anything in this document — a rigged auction, a lot that never shipped, a pay link for a lot you did not win — tell us athello@lotmasterhq.com. Include the group, the lot and roughly when. We read these, we keep the audit trail, and we would rather hear it from you than from a bank.

11. Changes

If we change this policy materially we will change the effective date at the top and tell account holders by email before it takes effect. We will not quietly broaden what counts as a breach and hope you do not read the diff.