Terms of Service

1. Who These Terms Are With

TraceForge is provided by Niagara Telecomms LLC ("TraceForge", "we", "us"). These terms are an agreement between us and the collection agency or business that opens the account ("your agency", "you").

The person who accepts these terms confirms they are authorized to accept them for the agency. They apply to everyone your agency gives a login to, and your agency is responsible for what those people do in TraceForge.

2. Software, Not Legal Advice

TraceForge is software. Nothing in TraceForge, its help pages, its settings, its defaults, its letter templates, its emails or anything we say is legal, compliance or accounting advice, and no attorney-client or advisory relationship is created. Talk to your own attorney about how the law applies to your agency.

3. Your Agency Is Responsible for Compliance

Your agency alone is responsible for following every law, regulation, rule and court order that applies to its collection practices and its use of TraceForge, in every state where it collects or calls. That includes, without limit: the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and Regulation F (validation notices, call-frequency limits, limited-content voicemails, electronic communications and opt-outs, time-barred debt, and the rest); the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and state autodialer and prerecorded-message laws; the Fair Credit Reporting Act if you report to credit bureaus or use consumer reports; the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (including permissible purpose for skip-trace and personal data); the Truth in Caller ID Act; call-recording consent laws (several states require every party to agree); state collection licensing, bonding and registration; state calling-hour and contact limits; the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act; rules on medical debt, bankruptcy, deceased consumers, cease-communication and dispute requests; the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and Regulation E and card-network and NACHA rules for payments; and UDAAP and consumer-protection laws.

You are responsible for training and supervising your staff and for everything they say and do when contacting consumers.

4. Safeguards Are Aids, Not Guarantees

TraceForge has tools that can help, such as the calling-hours lock, the area-code-to-state check, the age cutoff, the duplicate check, statuses, the "Over Age Limit" handling, reading phones and addresses from skip notes, and send-backs to other systems. They are aids only. They can be wrong, incomplete or switched off by your agency, and they do not make your agency compliant. Check what they produce before relying on it.

TraceForge does not count calls, attempts or conversations toward Regulation F’s call-frequency limits (7 calls in 7 days, or within 7 days of a conversation) and does not stop calls for that reason. Tracking and limiting call frequency is your agency’s responsibility.

Settings that relax a safeguard (for example turning off the calling-hours lock or the area-code rule) are your agency’s choice and responsibility.

5. Your Data

Your agency owns the account data it puts into TraceForge. We store and process it on your behalf to provide TraceForge. You are responsible for its accuracy, for having the right to collect, use and share it, and for following any rules from your clients and data providers (such as idiCORE or others) about how it can be used.

Each agency has its own database. Social Security numbers are stored encrypted, and backups are made nightly, but no system is perfectly secure and we don’t guarantee data can always be recovered. Keep your own records of anything you can’t afford to lose. You can export your data while your account is active.

You are responsible for who you give logins to, for removing access when someone leaves, and for keeping passwords private. Tell us right away at help@traceforge.solutions if you think an account has been misused.

6. Monitoring Your Staff

TraceForge records activity (logins, actions on accounts, time active) and, when your agency turns it on, call recordings, and lets supervisors listen to live calls. Giving any notices and getting any consents the law requires for monitoring and recording your employees and the people they call (including New York’s electronic monitoring notice law) is your agency’s responsibility. The notice TraceForge shows staff is provided as a convenience.

7. Connections to Other Systems

If you connect TraceForge to another system (such as a CollectionsMax database), you confirm you are allowed to, and you authorize TraceForge to read from it and, when you use send-back or similar tools, to write changes to it. We keep backups of what we change where we can, but you are responsible for checking the results. We are not responsible for that system, its data or what it does.

8. Payments You Take From Consumers

TraceForge records payments and payment plans your staff take and lists what is due. Card and bank account numbers are not stored in TraceForge. Charging a consumer is done through your own merchant or payment processor under your agreement with them. Your agency is responsible for having each consumer’s authorization (including written authorization for recurring payments), for the amounts, fees and dates, and for refunds and disputes.

9. Letters and Emails

Letter and email templates are your agency’s own. Their content, required disclosures and timing are your responsibility. Emails sent through TraceForge include an opt-out; honoring opt-outs and other consumer requests is your responsibility.

10. The Phone Add-On

The built-in phone is an optional add-on. It is not part of the free trial and turns on only after your subscription has been paid. Before using it, your agency also signs the Phone Service Terms and the 911 Notice in TraceForge, which are part of these terms.

Calls are placed one at a time by your staff. You may not use the phone for robocalls, prerecorded or artificial-voice messages, autodialing, or any calling the law doesn’t allow. Calls may only show phone numbers assigned to your agency.

Phone numbers are held on TraceForge’s account with our carrier and assigned to your agency while your phone service is active. If your phone service or account ends, numbers you have not asked to move to another provider within 30 days may be released and can’t be recovered. Numbers can be labeled as spam by carriers; we do not guarantee any number stays unlabeled or that a label can be removed.

911 calls through the browser phone depend on your internet connection, power and computers, and dispatchers receive the address you registered for each office. Keep the addresses current and keep another way to call 911 at every location.

11. Complaints, Notices and Pausing

Because your agency’s calls run through TraceForge’s carrier account, complaints and inquiries about them (from carriers, the Industry Traceback Group, consumers, regulators or anyone else) may come to us. When they do, we send your agency a notice in TraceForge and by email. Your agency must answer every notice by its reply-by date with what you found and what you did about it.

If a notice isn’t answered by its reply-by date, calling is automatically paused for your whole agency and stays paused until we resolve the notice. We may also pause calling, numbers or your account immediately and without notice if we believe calls may be unlawful, harmful, or a risk to our carrier relationships, and we may end your phone service or your account over repeated or serious complaints. Debtors may still be able to reach you while calling is paused. There are no refunds or credits for time paused.

You agree we may share call records, numbers, account and agency information with our carrier, the Industry Traceback Group, regulators, law enforcement and others when we are asked about calls made through your agency or when the law requires it, and you agree to cooperate with those requests.

12. Acceptable Use

You may not use TraceForge to break the law, harass or deceive anyone, spoof caller ID, send spam, or collect debts you are not authorized to collect. You may not try to get into another agency’s data, test or bypass TraceForge’s security, copy or reverse engineer TraceForge, resell it, or use it to build a competing product.

13. Billing

Prices are those shown on the website and Billing page when you subscribe. TraceForge is billed monthly in advance through Stripe: a base price that includes a set number of users, plus each additional user. A one-time setup fee is charged with the first payment.

The phone add-on is also billed in advance each month: a price per person (with a shared allowance of minutes), per regional and toll-free number, per 911 office, plus spam monitoring and voicemail transcription if you choose them. People or numbers added mid-month are charged for the rest of that month right away. Minutes over the allowance are billed after the month on your next bill. A one-time $299 phone setup fee is charged when you turn the phone on.

Setup fees, including the phone setup fee, are not refundable. Monthly charges are not refunded for partial months, unused minutes, unused numbers or time paused. Prices do not include taxes, which are added where required. We may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice.

If a payment fails, we may pause TraceForge or the phone add-on until it is paid, and we may end your account if it stays unpaid. You are responsible for all charges up to the end of your service, including minutes used.

The free trial lasts 14 days and doesn’t need a card. If you don’t subscribe, the collections screens stop working when it ends and nothing is charged.

14. Availability and Other Providers

We work to keep TraceForge available and correct, but it is provided "as is" and "as available", without any guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, error free, or fit for a particular purpose. TraceForge relies on other providers (including our phone carrier, payment processors, hosting, email and data providers), and we are not responsible for their outages or mistakes. We may make changes, updates and maintenance at any time.

15. Limits on Our Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, lost profits, lost collections, lost data, or for fines, penalties, judgments, settlements or claims arising from your agency’s collection practices, calls, letters, data or staff. Our total liability for all claims of any kind is limited to the amount your agency paid us in the 3 months before the claim.

16. You Cover Claims About Your Practices

Your agency agrees to defend, cover and hold harmless TraceForge, Niagara Telecomms LLC and their owners and staff from any claims, lawsuits, regulatory actions, fines, penalties, carrier charges, costs and attorney’s fees that arise from your agency’s collection practices, calls, messages, letters, payments, data, staff, or breaking these terms or the law.

17. Ending Your Account

You can cancel at any time from the Billing page; service continues to the end of the month you paid for. We can suspend or end your account for breaking these terms, for unpaid charges, for complaints as described above, or with 30 days’ notice for any other reason. When your account ends, you can ask for an export of your data within 30 days; after that we may delete it. Ending your TraceForge account doesn’t change any outside system you connected.

18. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms. When we make a meaningful change we’ll tell your agency, and your account admin will be asked to accept the new terms in TraceForge. Continuing to use TraceForge after that means your agency accepts them.

19. Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York. Any dispute will be handled in the state or federal courts serving Erie County, New York, and both sides agree to those courts.

20. Contact

Questions about these terms: help@traceforge.solutions.