How we handle your data

No Social Security numbers, no EIN, no bank account numbers, no bank statements, and no credit pulls — hard or soft. Nothing in any FundScout flow connects to a credit bureau. Financial details you enter (revenue, debts, estimated credit score) are self-reported figures you type in yourself.

• Funding requests — the business details you submit: state, loan type, industry, amount, purpose, debt schedule, credit history items, and optional notes.
• Account data — your email and name if you sign in with Google; nothing personal if you use the anonymous option (see below).
• Lender applications— company details, lending criteria, and the applicant's Google identity.
• Contact messages — what you send through the contact form.
• IP addresses — recorded on form submissions and server requests, and retained. We use them to block abuse (our public forms get real bot traffic) and to investigate misuse across our platform.
• Cookies — a session cookie when signed in, and an anonymous-account token cookie if you choose that flow. No third-party advertising cookies.

The anonymous borrower flow requires no name, no email, and no phone number. You get a token and a one-time secret; the secret is stored only as a bcrypt hash, so we cannot recover it or identify you from it.

One precise caveat: our abuse-prevention records store IP address, action, and timestamp — but they are not linked to any specific anonymous account. We can see that an anonymous account was created from an address; we do not record which one.

• Matching your funding request against vetted lenders.
• The qualification estimates shown on your results page — computed from your inputs by fixed rules, documented on our methodology page. No advertising profile is built from them.
• Abuse prevention and platform security.
• Responding when you contact us.

When we introduce you to a lender, the introduction goes through FundScout-managed contact channels — that containment is the core of the product. We do not sell borrower data, and lead reselling by lenders is a violation we actively police.

Funding requests, applications, contact messages, and abuse-prevention records (including IP addresses) are retained indefinitely — they are the audit trail behind our lender-accountability enforcement and the evidence base if your contact information is ever misused by a lender.

To ask what we hold about you, or to request deletion, contact info@fundscout.net. For anonymous accounts, include your account token — it is the only way we can locate your records, which is by design.