Safety and verification
You are letting someone into your home. Here is exactly what we do about that, and what we do not.
Before a sitter can be booked
Government photo ID
Every sitter uploads an identity document. It is stored outside the web root with restricted file permissions, and served only through an audit-logged link.
Proof of address
A recent document confirming where they live.
A selfie
Matched against the ID by a member of our team — a person, not an algorithm.
Human review
An admin approves, rejects with a reason, or asks for a better photo. Nothing goes live automatically.
Two-way reviews
Families review sitters and sitters review families, on completed bookings only. Both publish together, so neither can answer the other.
Protecting where people live
Approximate locations only
A sitter's profile shows a suburb and a circle roughly a kilometre across — we publish a point up to 500 metres from where they actually live, never a pin on their home. Their real coordinates never leave our database.
Contact details hidden until confirmation
Phone numbers, email addresses and links are masked in messages until a booking is confirmed.
Photo location data stripped
Uploaded photos are re-encoded to remove embedded GPS coordinates.
What we do not check
We do not run criminal record checks. We do not contact SAPS, and we do not obtain anything from them ourselves. Verification confirms that a sitter is who they say they are and lives where they say they live. It is not a police clearance, and we will not pretend otherwise.
What is new: a sitter can upload a police clearance certificate that they obtained themselves, from SAPS. A person on our team checks that certificate and records the date it was issued. That is us checking the certificate they got — not us running the check.
We also do not verify qualifications, first-aid training or references. Sitters may mention these on their profile; we do not check them.
Sitters can also state things about themselves on their profile — first aid training, a driver’s licence, their own transport. That is the sitter telling you something, not us confirming it, and it reads that way: “Says they have first aid training” — never a tick, never a badge.
The marks on this site that mean a person on our team actually checked something are ID verified — someone on our team compared that sitter’s identity document to a selfie of them and confirmed they match — and, once a sitter has uploaded a certificate and it has been reviewed, Police clearance checked — issued March 2026 (the month and year shown are theirs; March 2026 here is only an example) — someone on our team looked at the police clearance certificate that sitter obtained themselves and recorded the date it was issued. Nothing else on a profile — including every claim above — has been checked by anyone.
Meet before you book. Ask for references and check them yourself. Trust your judgement over any badge on a website — including ours.