01 Who is responsible for a message
The Customer is the sender. The Customer chooses the list, the offer and the wording, and is the advertiser where the message is advertising. Swarm is the tool that carries it and the Operator is not in a position to judge whether your list was lawfully obtained — only you know where it came from.
This policy is part of the public offer. Breach of it is a ground for immediate suspension without refund of the current period.
02 Consent and lawful basis
In Russia. Article 18(1) of Federal Law 38-FZ “On advertising” allows advertising over telecom networks — calls, SMS, messengers, email — only with the recipient's prior consent, and puts the burden of proving that consent on the distributor: if you cannot prove it, it is treated as not obtained. Article 18(2) prohibits distribution using automatic dialling or automatic mailing without human participation. Campaigns in Swarm are therefore configured, reviewed and launched by a named operator who stays reachable on the account, and the Operator does not offer an unattended mode.
Business correspondence that is not advertising — a question to a company about the offer it has itself published — is treated differently from advertising, but the line is drawn by the regulator, not by the sender's intent. If in doubt, hold consent.
Outside Russia. You are responsible for the law that applies to the recipient: the GDPR and the ePrivacy rules in the EU, CAN-SPAM in the United States, CASL in Canada, and local telecom and messenger rules elsewhere. Swarm supports the mechanics — consent records, suppression, working hours per region — but it cannot supply the lawful basis.
03 Lists
- upload only contacts obtained lawfully, and keep a record of where each list came from — the product stores a source field for exactly this;
- do not upload lists bought from a broker unless you can show a lawful basis covering your use;
- do not upload data collected in breach of a platform's terms of service;
- do not upload special categories of personal data — health, beliefs, political views, biometrics;
- keep the list current: remove contacts you know to be wrong, and never re-import a suppressed contact to get around a refusal.
04 Content
Prohibited outright: phishing, credential harvesting, malware links, impersonation of a person, company or authority, fake identities, false claims about price, availability, discount or delivery, adult content, and anything the law of the recipient's country forbids from being advertised.
Restricted, and only with written agreement in advance: gambling, medicines and medical claims, financial and investment offers, crypto-assets, weapons, tobacco, alcohol, political campaigning, and messaging to minors — each of these carries its own consent, licensing or disclosure duty that must be satisfied first.
The product itself blocks invented facts: the model may not state a price, a discount, an availability or a delivery time that is not in the customer's own data, and it hands the conversation to a person as soon as one is asked for. Do not defeat that with a template that states them anyway.
Where the law requires advertising to be labelled and reported — such as the Russian rules on marking internet advertising and reporting it to the unified register — that duty is the Customer's, and it must be settled before a campaign launches.
05 Opt-out
A refusal is honoured immediately, globally and permanently: the contact goes to the suppression list and no account, campaign or channel on the platform writes to it again. The check runs before every single send.
Do not argue with a refusal, do not send a “are you sure” follow-up, and do not move a suppressed contact to another channel. Where the law of the recipient's country requires an explicit unsubscribe instruction in the message, include it.
06 Platform rules and pacing
Every channel has its own rules — the WhatsApp Business messaging policy, Telegram's terms, the Viber business messaging rules, your mail provider's acceptable use terms — and they apply to you on top of this policy. Do not use the product to evade a platform's limits, to run identities that misrepresent who is writing, or to keep sending from an account a platform has restricted.
Swarm's pacing, warm-up and per-account isolation are safety measures, not a licence to send more. The Operator may lower limits on an instance if the pattern looks like it will get accounts banned.
07 Enforcement
Depending on what happened, the Operator will: ask for an explanation, pause a campaign, suspend an account, suspend the instance, or terminate the contract. A well-founded complaint from a recipient, a platform or a regulator is acted on first and discussed after.
Anyone can report abuse of a Swarm-hosted account to the abuse address in the details below. Include the message, the sender and the approximate time; the contact is suppressed on receipt and the report is passed to the Customer responsible for the campaign.