Terms

Updated 29 October 202613 min read

Introduction and Agreement

Welcome to bmborneo.com (“bmborneo.com“). These Terms of Use (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of our website, directory, classified marketplace, and related services.

  • Platform Operator: Rayyan Secutech
  • Registered Address: Brunei Darussalam
  • Contact Email: [email protected]
  • Governing Law: Brunei Darussalam

By registering an account or submitting content, you agree to these Terms. By using the site without an account you agree to the parts that apply to visitors. If you do not agree, please do not use the site. These Terms do not take away any right you have under consumer protection law that cannot be waived.

Eligibility and Account Registration

Who Can Register

  • You must be at least 18 years old to create an account and submit listings.
  • You must provide accurate, current, and complete registration information.
  • Accounts are registered under your personal email address. You are responsible for safeguarding your password and account credentials.

Email Verification Requirement

  • When account verification is active, newly registered accounts must verify ownership of their email address by opening the one-time link sent upon sign-up.
  • Unverified accounts may log in and manage their profile, but cannot publish listings, post reviews, save items, or send booking requests until verification is completed.

Account Security

  • You must notify us immediately if you suspect unauthorized access to your account.
  • You may not share your account or use another member’s account without authorization.
  • Staff members (administrators and moderators) are kept separate from ordinary member accounts and use strong sign-in protection.

Listing Rules and Prohibited Activities

Eligibility to List

  • You may only list a business if you are the legitimate owner, operator, or authorized representative of that business.
  • You may only post a classified advertisement if you lawfully own the item or are directly authorized by the owner to sell it.

Prohibited Content and Conduct

You agree not to submit, upload, or facilitate any listing, advertisement, or message that involves:

  • Illegal goods, narcotics, prescription drugs, or controlled substances
  • Firearms, weapons, explosives, or hazardous materials
  • Stolen property, counterfeit goods, or trademark-infringing items
  • Fraudulent schemes, multi-level marketing, predatory financial schemes, or unauthorized gambling
  • Sexually explicit services, adult escort services, or human trafficking
  • Defamatory, harassing, threatening, abusive, or hateful content, including untrue statements of fact that harm the reputation of a person or a company
  • Content that is unlawful in Brunei Darussalam or in the place where you sell, such as content that insults religion or the royal family, or that stirs up hatred between communities
  • Goods or services that need a licence, permit or certificate you do not hold. This includes medicines and regulated health products, alcohol, meat or food sold with a halal label, and anything else that the law restricts. Do not tick “Halal-certified” or upload a certificate unless it is a current halal certificate issued to your business.
  • Another person’s private details (such as their phone number, address or identity card) shared without their permission
  • Malicious software, automated scraping, spam, or attempts to circumvent rate limits and security controls

Listing Accuracy

  • All listing information—including business name, category, pricing, location, contact phone, and operating hours—must be accurate and truthful.
  • Listings must not contain misleading claims, fake opening hours, or disconnected contact numbers.
  • Duplicate listings for the same business branch or identical item are prohibited.

Moderation, Approval, and Rejection

Pre-Publication Review

  • To protect the directory from spam and fraud, submitted business listings, classified advertisements, and listing edits may be held in a moderation queue (pending status) prior to public display.
  • Automated approval is granted only where explicitly permitted by site policy for established roles.

Reporting Illegal or Harmful Content, and What We Do About It

We host listings, ads, reviews and photos that members write; we do not write them, and we cannot check all of them. Being published on the site is not an endorsement.

Anyone can tell us about content they believe is illegal, infringes their rights, is untrue about them, or breaks these Terms:

  • Use the “Report this listing” link on the listing, or write to [email protected].
  • Give us the address of the page, say what is wrong and why, and give your name and a way to contact you. If you say the content copies your work, say what the original is and that you own it or act for the owner. If you say it is untrue, say which statement and why.

What happens next:

  • A moderator reviews the report. We may hide, edit or remove the content while we look at it, or after, and we may warn or suspend the member who posted it.
  • We tell the member who posted it what was reported and what we did, unless the law or a police request prevents us. They may reply and ask us to look again.
  • We aim to review a report within 3 working days, and to look at a report of something clearly illegal or dangerous before the others. This is an aim, not a guarantee.
  • We remove content when a court order or a written law requires it, and we may give a member’s details to the police or a court when the law requires it.
  • We may suspend or close the account of a member who repeatedly posts content that infringes other people’s rights.

A report made in bad faith, or that is knowingly false, may lead to action against the person who made it.

Staff Moderation Rights

  • Site moderators and administrators have the full right to approve, reject, unpublish, or permanently delete any listing that violates these Terms or applicable local laws.
  • When a listing is rejected, the reason for rejection is recorded and displayed to the owner in their member dashboard. The owner may correct the issue and resubmit for review.

Community Reviews and Ratings

Reviews help consumers make informed decisions. To maintain review honesty:

  • Eligibility: You must be logged into an authenticated account to submit a review.
  • One Review Limit: You may submit strictly one review per business. If your review is rejected by moderators, you cannot submit another review for that business (no retry spamming).
  • No Self-Reviews: Business owners and authors cannot review their own businesses.
  • Genuine Experiences Only: Reviews must reflect your own firsthand, honest experience with the business. You are responsible for what you write. In Brunei Darussalam an untrue statement that harms the reputation of a person or a company can be a criminal offence as well as grounds for a civil claim.
  • Disputed Reviews: A business that believes a review is false can report it using the process in section 4. We do not remove a review only because it is critical.
  • Character Limits: Written review text must be between 20 and 1,500 characters.
  • Strict Prohibition on Links: Review text must NOT contain website links, URLs, domain names, email addresses, or phone numbers. Any review containing links is automatically rejected.
  • Moderator Approval: Every review must be reviewed and approved by staff before appearing publicly on the business page.
  • Business Owner Replies: A business owner may post one public reply per approved review. Owners cannot edit, alter, or delete customer reviews.
  • Rating Integrity: Business star ratings and review counts are calculated strictly from approved, authentic customer reviews.

Uploaded Photographs and Content Licence

Ownership of Your Content

You retain all copyright and proprietary rights in the text, photographs, logos, and descriptions you upload to the platform.

Licence Granted to bmborneo.com

By submitting or uploading content (including photographs, images, listing details and reviews), you grant bmborneo.com a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, for as long as the content is on the site, to:

  • Host, store, display, reproduce, and distribute the content on the website.
  • Resize, compress, format, and downscale images to ensure rapid page load times and mobile accessibility.
  • Display your listing across relevant search results, category pages, and promotional features on the platform.

The licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except that (a) copies kept in backups are removed when the backups are replaced, (b) a review that other people have replied to, or content we need to keep to deal with a report or a legal claim, may stay for as long as that need lasts, and (c) the licence continues for anything the law requires us to keep.

Image Standards

  • You warrant that you hold all necessary rights, licences, or permissions for every photo you upload.
  • Uploaded images must not depict nudity, copyright infringement, watermarked stock images belonging to third parties, or illegal content.
  • Do not upload a photo of an identifiable person unless they have agreed to it.
  • Our platform automatically resizes and optimizes large images on upload to maintain performance standards.

Commercial Placements

  • bmborneo.com offers “Featured” listing badges and “Sponsored” search keyword placements.
  • These placements are commercial advertising options set manually by site staff.

Manual Payment and Verification

  • There is no automated credit card or online payment gateway. All advertising packages are arranged offline via direct bank transfer and verified manually by staff before activation.
  • Advertising fees, durations, and refund terms: Featured and sponsored placements are arranged by our staff. The price, the length and what is included are agreed with you in writing before you pay, and every paid placement is labelled as paid. If we cannot provide a placement you have paid for, we refund the unused part. Otherwise fees are not refundable once the placement has started. This does not limit any right you have under consumer protection law.

Clear Disclosures

  • All paid placements are prominently labelled with visible badges (“Featured” or “Sponsored”) and screen-reader accessible attributes.
  • Paid placements are always temporary, have a mandatory expiry date, and are capped per category and search result page.
  • A “Featured” or “Sponsored” placement represents a paid advertising placement. It does NOT constitute an endorsement, guarantee of quality, or verification of the business by bmborneo.com.

Directory Role: No Escrow and No Party to Transactions

Directory Platform Only

bmborneo.com is an online advertising directory and classifieds venue. bmborneo.com is not a party to any contract, deal, agreement, booking, or transaction between buyers, sellers, visitors, and businesses.

No Escrow or Payment Processing

  • The platform operates NO held-money escrow, NO payment processing, and NO buyer protection fund.
  • We do not handle, hold, or transmit funds between users.
  • All purchases, payments, deposits, negotiations, and product inspections take place directly between you and the other party.
  • We do not own, inspect, store or deliver the items advertised, we do not check that sellers or businesses are who they say they are (except where a listing shows a Verified badge for the specific check it names), and we do not promise that any listing, price, review or description is correct.
  • If something goes wrong with a purchase, your claim is against the seller or business you dealt with, not against us. We will help by removing content and by acting on reports, as described in section 4.
  • Any classified ad offers or booking requests submitted through the site represent non-binding enquiries.

Pricing and Currency Display

  • Prices on classified ads and business profiles are set entirely by listing authors.
  • Where multi-currency price estimates are displayed, they are calculated from daily reference rates for convenience only and must not be treated as binding contractual figures.

Ownership Claims and Removal Requests

Claiming Unclaimed Listings

  • Public-source listings marked “Unclaimed — details from public sources” may be claimed by authorized business operators using the “Is this your business? Claim it” link.
  • Claimants must provide verifiable proof of ownership:
    • An email confirmation sent to an address at the business’s official website domain.
    • A phone callback to the business telephone number listed on the profile.
    • Or official registration documents submitted directly to administrators.

Ownership Disputes

  • If a business profile is already linked to a registered owner account, a subsequent claim constitutes an ownership dispute.
  • Disputes require mandatory verified proof and notification to the existing owner.
  • Submitting fraudulent ownership claims or falsified business documentation will result in immediate account termination.

Takedown Requests

Business operators who do not wish to have their public information included in the directory may submit a removal request using the “Remove my listing” form on the listing page. Takedown requests are reviewed and processed by site moderators.

Account Termination and Closure

Self-Service Account Deletion

You may terminate your account at any time via Dashboard > Profile > Delete my account. Deleting your account anonymizes your profile, unpublishes your listings to draft status and removes the contact details in them, and erases your personal reviews, requests, saved items and support tickets.

Suspension by Platform

We reserve the right to suspend, disable, or terminate any account, or remove any listing, without prior notice where we think that is needed to protect other people, if:

  • You violate these Terms of Use or our community guidelines.
  • Your listings receive substantiated abuse reports or fraud complaints.
  • You attempt to bypass security measures, spam the platform, or harass other users.

When we suspend or close an account we will tell you by email, say why unless the law stops us, and let you reply.

Disclaimer of Warranties

bmborneo.com is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We make no express or implied warranties regarding:

  • The accuracy, reliability, or completeness of listing content, business details, or user reviews.
  • The safety, quality, or legality of items or services advertised in the classifieds or business directory.
  • Continuous, uninterrupted, or error-free operation of the website.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not responsible for the content that members post, for deals made between members, for goods or services bought or sold offline, or for any indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit or loss of data. We do not guarantee that the site is always available or free of errors. Nothing in these Terms limits any right or liability that the law does not allow to be limited. If we are found liable to you, our total liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event.

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Rayyan Secutech, its officers, directors, employees, and agents from any claims, damages, liabilities, and expenses arising from your violation of these Terms or your infringement of any third-party rights.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Brunei Darussalam. Any disputes arising under these Terms shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Brunei Darussalam.

Changes, Notices and Complaints

  • We may change these Terms. We will post the new version here. If a change matters to your rights we will also email members. Using the site after a change means you accept it.
  • If part of these Terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
  • To make a complaint, give us a legal notice, or ask about these Terms, write to [email protected]. We will reply and tell you who is dealing with your message.