Compliance Program

Restricted verticals attract regulatory attention, fraud, and bad actors. This page describes the controls we run so that advertisers, publishers, and regulators can see how the network is kept clean.

01 Overview

D4RKW3B accepts verticals that most networks refuse: iGaming, crypto, adult, sweepstakes, nutra, dating, forex, VPN, and streaming. We can do that responsibly only by applying controls that are stricter than the mainstream default, not looser. The program rests on five commitments:

• Know every counterparty. No advertiser spends and no publisher is paid until identity, business, and (where relevant) licensing are verified.
• Review before serving. Every creative, landing page, and publisher property is reviewed by a person before it goes live, and re-reviewed on change.
• Serve only where lawful. Server-side geographic and age controls prevent campaigns from reaching markets or users where the offer is not permitted.
• Pay for human traffic only. Invalid traffic is filtered before billing and before payout, with independent third-party verification.
• Be accountable. Decisions are documented, appealable, and available to regulators and auditors on lawful request.

The compliance team reports to the Head of Compliance, who reports directly to the board and has authority to pause any campaign, zone, or account without commercial sign-off.

02 Advertiser Verification

Every advertiser completes verification before the first campaign is activated. Verification is renewed every 12 months and whenever a material change (new vertical, new jurisdiction, change of ownership) is detected.

2.1 Standard verification (all advertisers)

• Government-issued photo identification for the account holder and, for companies, for at least one director.
• Proof of business registration (certificate of incorporation or equivalent) and registered address, dated within the last 6 months.
• Declaration of beneficial owners holding 25% or more, with identification for each.
• Sanctions and politically exposed person screening of the entity, directors, and beneficial owners against UN, EU, UK OFSI, and US OFAC lists, re-run daily against list updates.
• Verification that the funding source (bank account, card, or wallet) is held in the name of the verified entity or an approved related party.

2.2 Enhanced verification (regulated verticals)

Agencies and media buyers running campaigns for clients must disclose the end advertiser for each campaign, and the end advertiser is verified to the same standard.

03 Publisher Verification

• Identity. Government-issued identification for the account holder is required before the first payout. Business publishers provide registration documents.
• Ownership. Every domain is verified by a DNS TXT record or HTML meta tag issued by the dashboard. Mobile apps are verified through the app store developer listing. Push subscriber lists are verified by inspecting the subscription domain and prompt flow.
• Content review. A compliance reviewer inspects each property for prohibited content, assigns the correct vertical flags (mainstream, adult, gambling), and confirms the presence of a privacy policy and, where needed, an age gate and consent mechanism.
• Traffic audit. The first 72 hours of traffic on each new zone run in audit mode: impressions are served and measured but revenue is held until the traffic quality score is confirmed. Zones that fail are not activated.
• Ongoing monitoring. Automated crawlers re-check every property weekly for content changes, tag placement violations, and new prohibited content. A traffic quality score is recalculated hourly per zone.
• Payout destination screening. Bank accounts and wallet addresses are screened against sanctions lists and, for crypto, against blockchain analytics risk indicators before each payout.

04 Creative and Landing Page Review

4.1 Process

1. Automated pre-screen checks file integrity, dimensions, malware signatures, redirect chains, SSL, and known prohibited domains. Failures are returned to the advertiser immediately.
2. A compliance reviewer examines each creative and clicks through to the landing page from multiple geographies and device types, using residential IP addresses so that cloaked pages are detected.
3. The reviewer applies the Acceptable Use Policy tests for legality, honesty, audience, and safety, and the vertical-specific conditions.
4. The decision (approved, approved with changes, rejected) is recorded with the reviewer's notes and a hash of the landing page content at the time of review.
5. Approved landing pages are re-crawled every 24 hours. If the content hash changes materially, the campaign is paused automatically and queued for re-review.

4.2 Service levels

Business hours are 08:00 to 20:00 UTC, Monday to Friday. Reviews outside those hours are handled by the on-call reviewer for accounts on managed service.

05 Traffic Quality and Invalid Traffic

Invalid traffic (IVT) is filtered at three stages so that advertisers are not billed for it and publishers are not paid for it.

• Pre-bid. Each ad request is scored in under 5 milliseconds against known bot signatures, data-centre IP ranges, headless browser fingerprints, impossible device combinations, and velocity rules. Requests scoring above the threshold receive no ad.
• Post-serve. Impressions, viewability, and clicks are analysed within the hour for patterns such as click-through rates outside human ranges, identical timing intervals, click-to-impression ratios above 100%, and geographic mismatches. Flagged events are excluded from billable counts.
• Independent verification. Anura and FraudScore independently score a sample of all traffic and 100% of traffic on new zones. Where third-party findings differ from ours, the stricter result is applied.

IVT rates are reported per zone and per campaign in the dashboard. Advertisers are credited for any IVT identified after billing, and publishers are notified when a zone's quality score falls below the activation threshold, with 48 hours to remediate before the zone is paused. Confirmed deliberate IVT results in termination under the Acceptable Use Policy.

06 Jurisdictional Controls

Geographic restrictions are enforced server-side at ad selection time, not left to advertiser targeting. We maintain three control lists that are updated as laws and licences change:

• Network exclusion list. Countries subject to comprehensive sanctions where no ads are served and no accounts are accepted. Currently: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions.
• Vertical exclusion lists. Per-vertical lists of markets where an offer type cannot be served regardless of advertiser targeting, for example markets where online gambling is prohibited or where retail CFD marketing is banned. Gambling campaigns are additionally restricted to the markets covered by the advertiser's verified licence.
• Conditional lists. Markets where an offer may be served only if specific conditions are met, such as a mandated risk warning, a local-language disclaimer, or a higher minimum age. The required element is checked during creative review.

Location is determined from IP address using a commercial geolocation database updated weekly, with proxy and VPN detection applied so that traffic masking its origin is excluded from restricted campaigns.

07 Age and Audience Controls

• Adult, gambling, alcohol, and other age-restricted campaigns are served only on inventory that the publisher has flagged as age-restricted and that compliance has confirmed. Mainstream inventory cannot receive these campaigns under any targeting configuration.
• Minimum age markers (18+ or 21+ by market) are required on creatives in these verticals and are checked at review.
• We do not offer age or interest targeting that could be used to reach minors, and we do not serve restricted campaigns on inventory classified as directed at children.
• Publishers running adult inventory must present an age gate before explicit content, and our crawler verifies that the gate is present.
• Gambling creatives may not use cartoon characters, youth-oriented imagery, or references to school or youth culture.

08 Payments, AML and Sanctions

D4RKW3B maintains an anti-money-laundering programme proportionate to its role as an advertising intermediary that accepts prepayment and makes payouts. Its elements are:

• Customer due diligence as described in sections 2 and 3, with enhanced due diligence for high-risk jurisdictions and politically exposed persons.
• Daily sanctions re-screening of all active accounts, beneficial owners, and payment destinations.
• Source-of-funds inquiries for single deposits above USD 25,000 or cumulative monthly deposits above USD 100,000.
• Blockchain analytics screening of every inbound and outbound cryptocurrency address for exposure to sanctioned entities, darknet markets, mixers, and known theft or ransomware addresses. Addresses with high-risk exposure are rejected.
• Transaction monitoring for patterns inconsistent with advertising activity, such as deposits followed by refund requests without campaign spend, or publisher payouts disproportionate to verifiable inventory.
• Refunds returned only to the original funding source, in the original asset.
• Suspicious activity reporting to the relevant financial intelligence unit where legally required, and record retention for five years after the end of the relationship.

09 Data Protection

Our handling of personal data is described in full in the Privacy Policy. The controls most relevant to compliance are:

• IP addresses in ad logs are truncated within 24 hours; event-level data is retained for 13 months and then aggregated.
• Our tag honours the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework and Global Privacy Control signals, and runs in a non-identifying mode without consent where consent is required.
• Advertisers are technically prevented from passing names, email addresses, or phone numbers in postbacks; such parameters are stripped at ingestion and the advertiser is notified.
• A data processing agreement is available to any advertiser or publisher that requires one, and we maintain a register of sub-processors.
• Staff access to personal data is role-based, logged, and reviewed quarterly.

10 Responsible Advertising

Beyond legal minimums, we require the following in the verticals where consumer harm is most likely:

• Gambling. Responsible gambling messaging or a link to a support organisation on every creative and landing page; no targeting of users who have triggered a self-exclusion signal we receive from an operator; no messaging that frames gambling as income, a solution to debt, or a way to recover losses.
• Financial products. Risk warnings that match the regulator's prescribed wording; no messaging that presents trading as low-risk or passive income; no fabricated results.
• Health and nutra. No disease claims, no fear-based messaging, no fabricated medical endorsements, and clear disclosure of trial and subscription terms before payment.
• Subscriptions in any vertical. Price, billing frequency, and cancellation method stated on the page where payment details are entered, in the same language and at a legible size.

11 Law Enforcement and Rights Holder Requests

Requests for account information, content removal, or preservation of records from law enforcement agencies, regulators, and courts should be sent to legal@d4rkw3b.network. We require a valid legal instrument appropriate to the requesting jurisdiction, review each request for scope and validity, and respond within the period the instrument specifies or within 10 business days where none is specified. Emergency requests involving imminent risk to life are handled within 24 hours. We notify affected account holders unless prohibited by law or the request concerns prohibited content under the Acceptable Use Policy.

Rights holders may send infringement notices to abuse@d4rkw3b.network. Valid notices result in removal of the infringing creative or suspension of the infringing zone within one business day, and repeat infringers are terminated.

12 Audits and Reporting

• The compliance program is reviewed quarterly by the Head of Compliance and annually by external counsel, with findings reported to the board.
• Traffic quality measurement is validated annually by an independent fraud verification vendor.
• Information security controls are tested annually by an independent penetration testing firm.
• Advertisers spending above USD 50,000 per month and publishers earning above USD 25,000 per month may request a compliance summary for their account, including IVT rates, review history, and enforcement actions, once per quarter.
• Aggregate enforcement statistics (number of creatives rejected, accounts terminated, IVT rate network-wide) are published in this section at each quarterly review. Figures for the quarter ending 30 September 2026: 6.8% of submitted creatives rejected at first review; 214 accounts terminated for policy violations; network-wide billable IVT rate 0.9% after filtering.

13 Contact

Compliance team: compliance@d4rkw3b.network
Abuse and infringement reports: abuse@d4rkw3b.network
Legal and law enforcement requests: legal@d4rkw3b.network
Data protection: privacy@d4rkw3b.network