SP-Heavy
SP-Heavy
All legal documents
All legal documents

Acceptable Use Policy

Effective: [EFFECTIVE DATE] · Version 1.0

This policy forms part of the Terms of Service. It sets out what you may not sell or do through SP-Heavy.

We are not trying to police your business. These restrictions exist because a payment platform inherits the legal and financial risk of everything it processes: our banking partners, mobile-money operators and regulators hold us accountable for our merchants' activity, and some categories carry disproportionate fraud, dispute or money-laundering exposure.

1. Prohibited activities

We will not process payments for these under any circumstances. Attempting to is a material breach and may lead to immediate termination, forfeiture of your balance to cover resulting losses, and reporting to the authorities.

Illegal or harmful

  • Anything unlawful in Cameroon, in the payer's country, or in any country connected to the transaction
  • Child sexual abuse material, or any sexual content involving minors
  • Human trafficking, forced labour, or the sale of human organs
  • Terrorist financing or support for a proscribed organisation
  • Narcotics and controlled substances, and equipment for producing them
  • Weapons, ammunition, explosives, and their components
  • Stolen goods, including stolen digital accounts and data
  • Counterfeit goods, or goods infringing another party's trade mark or copyright
  • Wildlife trafficking, ivory, or protected species

Financial crime and evasion

  • Money laundering, structuring, or transactions designed to obscure the source of funds
  • Ponzi, pyramid and matrix schemes; "money circulation" schemes; get-rich-quick programmes
  • High-yield investment programmes and unlicensed investment schemes
  • Unlicensed money transmission, currency exchange, or "money mule" activity
  • Processing on behalf of another business so as to disguise who is really being paid (transaction laundering — see §3)
  • Shell companies with no genuine commercial activity
  • Any party subject to United Nations, CEMAC, or other applicable sanctions

Deceptive or abusive

  • Fraud of any kind, including phishing and social-engineering operations
  • Fake or misrepresented goods and services
  • Unsolicited bulk messaging, and any business built on it
  • Malware, spyware, ransomware, and credential-stealing tools
  • Services designed to circumvent security controls or facilitate unauthorised access
  • Purchasing or selling engagement, reviews, or fake accounts

Other

  • Adult content and services involving non-consenting persons
  • Unlicensed gambling, lotteries, betting and games of chance
  • Unlicensed pharmaceuticals and prescription medicines
  • Multi-level marketing where income derives mainly from recruitment
  • Debt collection using intimidation or harassment

2. Restricted activities — prior written approval required

These are lawful but higher-risk. You may process them only with our prior written approval, and we may require additional licensing evidence, a reserve, higher fees, or settlement delays.

  • Licensed gambling and betting
  • Financial services, lending, insurance, and foreign exchange
  • Cryptocurrency purchase, sale, exchange, or on/off-ramping
  • Crowdfunding, donations, and charitable collection
  • Travel agencies, tour operators, and ticketing (long delivery windows create dispute exposure)
  • Event ticketing and resale
  • Subscription services with automatic renewal
  • Precious metals, gemstones, and high-value collectibles
  • Tobacco, nicotine products, and alcohol
  • Firearms accessories where lawful
  • Adult content between consenting adults, where lawful
  • Pharmacies and telehealth
  • Legal cannabis and CBD products, where lawful
  • Marketplaces and platforms paying out to third-party sellers
  • Extended warranties and guarantee products
  • Any business collecting payment far in advance of delivery

Applying: email [COMPLIANCE EMAIL] with a description of the business, your licences, your refund policy, and your expected volumes. Processing in a restricted category without approval is treated as a prohibited activity.

3. Transaction laundering

You may only process payments for your own business, for the activity you described during verification.

You must not:

  • Process payments for another business, whether or not you charge for it
  • Let anyone else use your account or API keys to accept payments
  • Process payments for goods or services different from those you registered
  • Split a single sale across multiple accounts, or across multiple transactions, to avoid limits or scrutiny

Transaction laundering is one of the most serious breaches on this list. It destroys the entire purpose of merchant verification, and it is how payment platforms lose their licences.

4. Technical use

You must not:

  • Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the platform, other merchants' data, or our infrastructure
  • Interfere with the service, including through denial-of-service, or by deliberately exceeding rate limits
  • Scrape, resell or redistribute the service without written permission
  • Submit transactions you know or suspect to be unauthorised, or test transactions against the live environment using real payer numbers without consent
  • Use the sandbox to simulate volume you have no genuine intention of processing
  • Reverse engineer or attempt to extract our fraud rules

Security research conducted in good faith — without accessing other users' data, degrading the service, or exploiting a finding — is welcome. Report to [SECURITY EMAIL].

5. Enforcement

Depending on severity, we may:

  1. Ask you to explain or to stop
  2. Require additional verification
  3. Impose a reserve, a limit, or a settlement delay
  4. Suspend processing
  5. Terminate the account and hold the balance to cover resulting losses
  6. Report to law enforcement, the financial intelligence unit (ANIF), regulators, or the affected payment providers

We act proportionately, and we tell you the reason unless we are legally prohibited from doing so — which is the case for suspicious-activity reporting.

6. Reporting a violation

If you believe a merchant is using SP-Heavy in breach of this policy, tell us at [COMPLIANCE EMAIL]. Include the business name, the checkout link or reference if you have one, and what you observed.

7. Changes

We update this list as risks, regulations and provider requirements change. Material changes are notified per §17 of the Terms of Service.

For counsel: the prohibited and restricted lists must be reconciled with the merchant-category restrictions in your MTN, Orange and settlement-bank contracts. Those contracts usually impose their own prohibited list, and where they are stricter than this document, theirs governs — permitting something here that your provider forbids exposes you directly.

[COMPANY LEGAL NAME] · Questions: [COMPLIANCE EMAIL]