Money Watchmen (“we,” “us”) provides a fraud-monitoring service for personal bank and card accounts. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. We wrote it to be read.
What we collect
- Account information: your name, mobile number, and email address. Customer accounts have no password: you sign in with a one-time security code sent to your mobile number (or your email as a backup). Codes are stored only as one-way hashes and expire within minutes.
- Financial transaction data: when you connect an institution through Plaid, we receive transaction descriptions, amounts, dates, and masked account identifiers (last four digits only). We never receive or store your bank password, and we never store full account or card numbers.
- Your responses: whether you told us a charge was yours, unrecognized, or you weren’t sure. We use this to improve what we show you.
- Trusted Contact details: the name, relationship, and contact information you provide for anyone you add.
- Billing: handled by Stripe. We store your subscription status and the last four digits and brand of your payment card, never the full number.
- Technical data: IP address, browser type, and product-usage events (which we minimize and never tie to financial details).
How we use it
- To watch the accounts you connect for unusual activity and alert you by text and email.
- To send account and billing messages, verification codes, and a monthly protection summary.
- To provide human support when you ask for it.
- To keep the service secure, including audit logs of sensitive actions.
We do not sell your personal or financial data. We do not use it for advertising.
SMS / text messaging data
If you opt in to text messages, we collect and process your mobile phone number, your SMS consent status, the date and time you consented, the version of the consent disclosure you saw, your opt-out status and opt-out time, message delivery information and status, inbound support messages you send us, and your responses to alerts where applicable.
We use this information to send unusual financial activity alerts, account notifications, account security notifications, service communications, connected-account and reconnection notifications, and customer support messages; to operate the fraud-monitoring service; and to meet legal and compliance requirements.
Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be sold, rented, shared, or transferred to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.
SMS-related information may be disclosed to service providers that are necessary to operate Money Watchmen’s communications and service infrastructure, such as telecommunications and messaging providers, solely as necessary to provide the service, comply with law, maintain security, or support customers. Reply STOP to any message to opt out at any time; reply HELP for help.
Who we share it with
Only service providers that help us run Money Watchmen, under contracts limiting their use: Plaid (account connections), Stripe (payments), Twilio (text messages), Resend (email), Railway (hosting), Sentry (error monitoring), and PostHog (product analytics). Trusted Contacts you add receive only what you allow: merchant, amount, and why we noticed — never account numbers, credentials, or your full history. We may disclose information if required by law.
How we use Plaid
Plaid connects your bank or card to Money Watchmen. When you connect an institution, Plaid gives us a connection key that lets us read transactions for that institution only. We keep that key encrypted, use it only on our servers to fetch transactions, and never show it to you, to your browser, or to anyone else. We cannot move money. When you disconnect an institution or delete your account we tell Plaid to end the connection and we destroy the key. If Plaid cannot be reached at that moment, the encrypted key is held in a queue only until Plaid confirms, and is then destroyed; a record of every such request is kept so we can prove it happened. Plaid’s own handling of your data is described in the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.
How long we keep it
We follow a written Data Retention and Disposal Policy that is enforced automatically by our systems every day and reviewed every quarter. In short:
- While your account is active: your profile, connected accounts and alert preferences for as long as you use the service; transactions, alerts and monthly summaries for 24 months from their date, then deleted.
- When you disconnect an institution: we tell Plaid to end the connection, destroy the connection key, and delete that institution’s transactions and alerts immediately.
- When you delete your account: every institution is disconnected at Plaid, every connection key is destroyed, and your transactions, accounts, alerts, responses, summaries and Trusted Contacts are deleted immediately. Your name, mobile number and email are removed from your profile, all devices are signed out, and your membership is cancelled.
- What we keep after deletion: proof of your text-message consent and opt-out; billing records (subscription status, amounts, card brand and last four digits, never a card number); the security audit trail; a record that says the deletion happened and what it covered. These hold no bank data and are kept for the periods our policy sets for consent, accounting and security purposes.
- Operational records: one-time codes within a day of expiry; sign-in sessions 30 days after they end; provider delivery data and sync logs 90 days; message bodies are removed after 90 days and delivery records after 2 years; audit and support records 2 years.
- Backups: our hosting provider keeps database backups for a limited, rolling period (up to 89 days), accessible only through our hosting account. Deleted data ages out of backups on that cycle. We do not restore deleted customer data from backups in ordinary operation.
Your choices
- Disconnect any institution at any time from Connected Accounts; change alert preferences from your account.
- Export a copy of your data from Account Settings (we ask for a fresh security code).
- Delete your account from Account Settings. We ask you to type a confirmation phrase and enter a fresh security code sent to you at that moment; deletion then happens immediately.
- Reply STOP to any text to opt out of SMS; we will use email instead.
- Ask us anything about your data, or request any of the above by phone if you cannot sign in: see Your privacy choices.
Security
Encrypted connections (TLS), provider tokens encrypted at rest, masked account numbers, two-step sign-in, rate limiting, and audit logging. No method is perfect; if we learn of a breach affecting you we will notify you as required by law.
Children
Money Watchmen is for adults 18 and older.
Contact
Questions? Email help@moneywatchmen.com or call or text (833) 928-2480.