Plain English Summary: Your verification is confidential. The financial documents you upload for CPA verification are never sold and never shared with sponsors, marketers, or anyone else for their own purposes — only your assigned licensed CPA and the secure providers that process them on our behalf ever see them (including an automated document-review step described in Section 4), and they are permanently deleted 90 days after your letter is issued. Separately, we collect your name, email, phone, and investment preferences when you use our website. We share or sell that contact and profile information to vetted third-party investment sponsors and financial service providers only if you opt in by checking the optional box on our form. If you leave that box unchecked, we never share or sell your information. (The one exception is a verification you request through a sponsor who is covering it: your verification letter and accredited-investor status go to that specific sponsor as the service you asked us to perform — never your financial documents — see Section 3.) You can opt out at any time by emailing optout@accreditednow.org. Separately, some verifications include optional investor-onboarding checks — an automated identity check, a sanctions/PEP screening (with optional ongoing monitoring), and, for entities, a business-verification (KYB) check; when they apply, we collect a facial image and government-ID images to confirm your identity (handled by our provider and not retained by us) and check names against government watchlists — described in Section 5.
Table of Contents
- Information We Collect
- How We Use Your Information
- Data Sharing and Sale
- Financial Documents — Special Protections
- Identity Verification and Sanctions Screening
- Cookies and Tracking
- Data Security
- Your Rights and Choices
- California Residents — CCPA Rights
- Children's Privacy
- Changes to This Policy
- Contact Us
1. Information We Collect
Information You Provide Directly
When you use AccreditedNow.org we collect the following categories of personal information:
| Category | Examples | Collected When |
|---|---|---|
| Identity Information | First name, last name | Quiz form, verify.html |
| Contact Information | Email address, phone number | Quiz form, verify.html |
| Location Information | State of residence | Quiz form |
| Financial Profile | Net worth range, investment interests, qualification method | Quiz form, verify.html |
| Financial Documents | Tax returns, W-2s, brokerage statements, FINRA licenses | CPA verification submissions only |
| Identity & Biometric Data | Images of your government-issued photo ID and a facial image (selfie) with a liveness check | Optional identity check, only when the onboarding add-on applies (see Section 5) |
| Screening Data | The result of a sanctions and politically-exposed-person (PEP) watchlist check on your name and date of birth, and, where enrolled, the results of recurring ongoing monitoring | Optional onboarding add-on only (see Section 5) |
| Business / Entity Data | For entity cases with the business-verification (KYB) add-on: the entity's registry and good-standing data, and ownership documents (such as a certificate of formation or operating agreement) used to identify beneficial owners | Entity onboarding add-on only (see Section 5) |
| Assessment Results | Whether you appear to qualify as an accredited investor | Quiz completion |
| Communication Data | Special instructions, notes, messages | verify.html, contact forms |
Information Collected Automatically
When you visit our website we automatically collect certain technical information including your IP address, approximate location (such as your U.S. state) derived from your IP address, browser type, device type, pages visited, and time spent on pages. This information is used to improve our website and, in the case of approximate location, may be included in the lead profile associated with your submission. Technical information is not sold to third parties except as described in the "Data Sharing and Sale" section, and only if you have opted in.
Information from Third Parties
We use third-party services including Abstract API for email validation, Uploadcare for secure document storage, Stripe for payment processing, MailerLite for email communications, Anthropic for the automated document-review step described in Section 4, Didit for the optional identity verification, sanctions/PEP screening, ongoing monitoring, and entity business verification (KYB) described in Section 5, and ipapi.co for approximate location lookup from IP address. These services may collect additional information subject to their own privacy policies.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect for the following purposes:
- To deliver your accredited investor self-assessment results and printable certificate
- To provide CPA verification services when requested and paid for
- To send you the welcome email sequence and investment-related communications you consented to receive
- To add you to our email marketing list in the appropriate subscriber group
- To share or sell your contact and financial profile information to vetted third-party investment sponsors, fund managers, real estate syndicators, and financial service providers — but only if you have opted in by checking the optional consent box on our form
- To maintain our lead database and prevent duplicate records
- To improve our website, services, and user experience
- To comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service
- To send transactional emails including payment confirmations and CPA verification updates
3. Data Sharing and Sale
Important Disclosure: We share or sell your personal information for marketing purposes only if you affirmatively opt in by checking the optional consent box on our form. If you do not check that box, we will never share or sell your information with any third party for that party's own marketing. The details below describe what we share, and with whom, when you have opted in. The one exception is a verification you request through a sponsor who is covering it: there, sharing your verification result with that specific sponsor is the service you asked us to perform, not optional marketing — see Verification You Request Through a Sponsor below.
When You Opt In, We May Share or Sell Your Information With:
- Investment Sponsors and Fund Managers — companies offering private equity, venture capital, hedge fund, and Regulation D investment opportunities
- Real Estate Syndicators — companies offering private real estate investment opportunities
- Financial Service Providers — registered investment advisors, broker-dealers, and financial planning firms
- Marketing Partners — companies that market financial products and services to accredited investors
Information We Share:
- Your name, email address, and phone number
- Your state of residence
- Your net worth range and investment interests
- Whether you self-reported as qualifying as an accredited investor
- Whether your email address has been confirmed
Information We Never Share:
- Financial documents submitted for CPA verification (tax returns, W-2s, brokerage statements)
- Your actual net worth or income figures
- Payment information (handled entirely by Stripe)
- Passwords or authentication credentials
"Never shared" here means we never disclose these to investment sponsors, fund managers, syndicators, marketers, or any other party for that party's own purposes, and we never sell them. It does not restrict the secure service providers listed immediately below, who process this information solely to deliver the service you purchased and only under our instructions.
Verification You Request Through a Sponsor
When you begin an accredited-investor verification through a link from an investment sponsor, fund manager, or syndicator who is covering (paying for) that verification, your signed verification letter and your accredited-investor status are shared with that specific sponsor. This is the service you asked us to perform — the verification exists so that sponsor can rely on your accredited status for their offering — so it is not a sale, is not the optional marketing sharing described above, and is not governed by that consent box. It is limited to the one sponsor whose link you used. Your uploaded financial documents, the automated summary derived from them, and your actual net worth or income figures are never shared with the sponsor. If you would rather not share your result with a sponsor, do not proceed with a sponsor-covered verification — you can verify on your own instead and then choose whether to share the letter yourself.
Service Providers
We share information with service providers who help us operate our business including Airtable (database), MailerLite (email marketing), Make.com (automation), Uploadcare (document storage), Stripe (payments), Abstract API (email validation), Anthropic (automated document review — see Section 4), Didit (identity verification, sanctions/PEP screening, ongoing monitoring, and entity business verification — see Section 5), and Vercel (web hosting). These providers are contractually prohibited from using your data for their own marketing purposes.
Legal Requirements
We may disclose your information if required by law, court order, or government authority, or if we believe disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of AccreditedNow LLC, our users, or the public.
Business Transfers
If AccreditedNow LLC is acquired, merged, or sells substantially all of its assets, your information may be transferred to the acquiring entity. We will notify you via email of any such change in ownership.
4. Financial Documents — Special Protections
Enhanced Protection: Financial documents you upload for CPA verification receive the highest level of protection. We never sell them, and we never disclose them to investment sponsors, fund managers, syndicators, marketing partners, or any other party for that party's own purposes. They are handled only by your assigned licensed CPA and by the secure service providers that process them on our behalf, described below.
Documents submitted through our licensed CPA verification service (verify.html) including tax returns, W-2s, 1099s, brokerage statements, bank statements, and FINRA license copies are:
- Encrypted in transit using TLS 1.3 encryption
- Stored with AES-256 encryption at rest via Uploadcare's secure servers
- Reviewed by your assigned licensed CPA, who is the only person who sees them and the only person who decides your verification
- Processed by an automated document-review step before that review, described immediately below
- Never sold, and never disclosed to investment sponsors, marketing partners, or any other party for that party's own purposes
- Permanently deleted from our systems 90 days after your verification letter is issued, together with the automated summary derived from them
- Retained longer only at your explicit written request. (Separately, the results of any identity, screening, monitoring, or business-verification checks are kept as compliance records on a longer track under Section 5; those results are stored by us, while the underlying biometric image and any KYB ownership documents are held by our verification provider, not in our systems.)
Automated Document Review
To reduce errors and shorten turnaround, your uploaded documents are processed by an automated review step before your CPA reads them. This step transmits the documents to Anthropic, our artificial-intelligence service provider, which extracts the assets, liabilities, income figures, and document dates they contain and returns a structured summary — a work paper — that your CPA uses as a starting point.
Three things about this step matter, and we state them plainly:
- It never makes the decision. The automated step does not verify, approve, or decline anything, and it cannot change the status of your case. A licensed CPA reviews the underlying documents and makes the determination. The summary is a convenience for that CPA, not a substitute for their judgment.
- Your documents are not used to train artificial-intelligence models. Our agreement with Anthropic prohibits it, and this processing is not retained by Anthropic for training purposes.
- The summary is treated exactly like the documents. It is stored under the same access controls, is never sold or disclosed to sponsors or marketers, and is deleted on the same 90-day schedule as the documents it was derived from.
If you would prefer that your documents skip the automated review step and go directly to your CPA, email info@accreditednow.org before you upload and we will process your case manually at no additional cost. Choosing manual review may add time to your turnaround.
5. Identity Verification and Sanctions Screening
When this applies: Some verifications include optional investor-onboarding checks — an automated identity check, a sanctions/PEP watchlist screening, optional ongoing monitoring, and, for entities, a business-verification (KYB) check. These are offered through participating investment sponsors (identity screening is also available at no charge to individuals) and are separate from the CPA document review in Section 4. Each runs only when it is part of your case and you consent to it. If your verification does not include these checks, nothing in this section applies to you.
Identity Verification
To confirm you are who you say you are, the identity check collects images of your government-issued photo ID (such as a driver's license, passport, or state ID) and a facial image (a selfie) with a liveness check that confirms a live person is present. This step is performed by our identity-verification provider, Didit, and is used for the sole purpose of confirming your identity for the verification. You consent to it at the moment the check is performed. If you would rather not complete an automated identity check, you can upload a photo of your government-issued ID instead and your CPA will review it manually.
Biometric Information
The facial image and liveness check involve biometric information — a scan of facial geometry used to match your selfie to your photo ID. Several states give this data special legal protection, notably Illinois (the Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA), Texas (the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act), and Washington. We state our practices below as our written biometric policy:
- Consent before collection. We obtain your informed consent before any biometric information is collected. You give it by checking the consent box presented before the identity check begins. If you do not consent, no biometric information is collected — you upload a photo of your government-issued ID and your CPA reviews it manually instead.
- Used only to verify your identity. We do not use biometric information for advertising, profiling, or any purpose other than confirming your identity for this verification.
- Never sold, never profited from. We do not sell, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from your biometric information, and we never disclose it to sponsors, marketers, or any other party for that party's own purposes.
- Not used to train artificial-intelligence models.
- Retention and destruction schedule. AccreditedNow does not retain the facial image or the underlying facial-geometry data at all. The image is collected and held only by our identity-verification provider, Didit, solely to perform the check, and is destroyed when the purpose of the check has been satisfied or within the period required by applicable law, whichever occurs first. AccreditedNow keeps only the outcome of the check (verified or not), never the image.
Sanctions and Watchlist Screening
The onboarding add-on also screens your name and date of birth against government sanctions lists and politically-exposed-person (PEP) databases, so that the sponsor and your CPA can rely on a completed anti-money-laundering (AML) check. We record the result of that screening (for example, cleared or flagged for review). This screening is performed by Didit on our behalf. Screening is informational: it is checked against third-party and government data that may be incomplete or out of date, a result is not a guarantee, and a flagged result is routed to a licensed CPA for review — it is never an automatic decline.
Ongoing Monitoring
Where a sponsor elects it for its investors, the sanctions/PEP screening may be extended into ongoing monitoring — your name is re-screened against watchlist changes on a recurring basis so a new match that appears after your initial check can be surfaced. When it applies, monitoring runs for a limited term (by default up to five years), after which it ends unless renewed. We keep only the monitoring result and its dates, on the compliance-records track described below; the same "informational, not a guarantee, reviewed by a CPA" limits apply. Monitoring is performed by Didit on our behalf and applies only to cases a sponsor has enrolled — it does not apply to a self-paid individual verification.
Business Verification (KYB) for Entities
When an entity (such as an LLC, trust, or fund) is being verified and the business-verification (KYB) add-on applies, we also verify the entity itself. This confirms the entity's registration and good standing in official government business registries, screens the entity against the sanctions/PEP lists above, and reviews the ownership documents you provide (such as a certificate of formation, articles of organization, or an operating agreement) to identify the entity's beneficial owners. Registry data is retrieved, and the ownership documents are collected and processed, by Didit on our behalf. Those KYB ownership documents are held by Didit under its own retention schedule, not in our systems — AccreditedNow keeps only the KYB result (verified or not) as a compliance record on the track described below. If a document you provide for KYB is also needed for your CPA's accreditation review, the copy you upload for that review is a separate copy held in our systems and handled under Section 4 (including deletion on the 90-day schedule), independent of the KYB copy held by Didit. KYB applies only to entity cases with the add-on; nothing in this subsection applies to an individual verification.
How Long We Keep Identity, Screening, Monitoring, and KYB Records
Unlike the financial documents in Section 4, which are permanently deleted 90 days after your letter is issued, the results of your identity check, sanctions/PEP screening, ongoing monitoring, and business verification are retained by AccreditedNow as compliance records (evidence that a required check was performed) for the period required by law and our record-keeping obligations, which for these anti-money-laundering and identity records is generally about five years and may be longer where the law requires. This longer compliance-records track is an express exception to the 90-day deletion in Section 4. As noted above, the biometric facial image and the KYB ownership documents themselves are not retained by AccreditedNow — they are held only by our provider, Didit, under its own schedule; we keep the results, not the underlying images or documents. These records are never sold and never disclosed to any party for that party's own purposes; the verified/screened status may be shown to the sponsor whose offering you are being onboarded for, as the whole purpose of the add-on.
6. Cookies and Tracking
Our website uses minimal cookies and tracking technologies:
- Essential cookies — required for the website to function correctly
- Analytics — we may use basic analytics to understand how visitors use our site
- Advertising & conversion tracking — we use Google Ads conversion tracking, Google Analytics (GA4), and the LinkedIn Insight Tag to measure advertising performance, understand which campaigns bring visitors to us, and show our ads to people who have visited this site. These tools set cookies and tags in your browser and may record the pages you view here. We do not sell the data collected by these tools. You can opt out of LinkedIn ad targeting in your LinkedIn account settings, and of Google ad personalization at adssettings.google.com
You can disable cookies in your browser settings. This may affect some website functionality but will not prevent you from using our core services.
7. Data Security
We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your information:
- All data transmitted to and from our website is encrypted using HTTPS/TLS
- Lead data is stored in Airtable with access controls limiting who can view records
- API keys and credentials are stored securely and not exposed publicly
- Email validation via Abstract API helps prevent fraudulent submissions
- Payment processing is handled entirely by Stripe — we never store credit card information
While we take reasonable precautions no data transmission over the internet is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security of your information. In the event of a data breach we will notify affected users as required by applicable law.
8. Your Rights and Choices
Opt Out of Data Sharing and Sale
You may opt out of the sharing or sale of your personal information at any time using our Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information page, or by emailing optout@accreditednow.org with your name and email address. We also honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signals as a valid opt-out request. We will process your request within 15 business days and remove you from all data sharing and sale lists.
Unsubscribe from Marketing Emails
Every marketing email we send includes an unsubscribe link. You may also email optout@accreditednow.org to be removed from our email list.
Access and Correction
You may request a copy of the personal information we hold about you or request corrections to inaccurate information by emailing info@accreditednow.org.
Deletion
You may request deletion of your personal information by emailing optout@accreditednow.org. Note that we may retain certain information as required by law or for legitimate business purposes such as fraud prevention.
Data Portability
You may request a copy of your personal information in a portable format by emailing info@accreditednow.org.
9. California Residents — CCPA Rights
If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) grants you additional rights regarding your personal information:
Right to Know
You have the right to request information about the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you, the categories of sources, our business purpose for collecting or selling it, and the categories of third parties with whom we share it.
Right to Delete
You have the right to request deletion of personal information we have collected about you, subject to certain exceptions.
Right to Opt Out of Sale
You have the right to opt out of the sale of your personal information. To exercise this right, use our Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information page or email optout@accreditednow.org with subject line "CCPA Opt Out." We will process your request within 15 business days. We also honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signals as a valid opt-out request.
Right to Non-Discrimination
We will not discriminate against you for exercising your CCPA rights. You will receive the same quality of service regardless of whether you opt out of data sale.
How to Submit a CCPA Request
Email info@accreditednow.org or optout@accreditednow.org with your full name, email address, and the specific right you wish to exercise. We may need to verify your identity before processing your request.
Categories of Personal Information Sold
In the past 12 months we have sold or may sell the following categories of personal information to investment sponsors and financial service providers: identifiers (name, email, phone), geolocation data (state), and inferences drawn from your quiz responses (investment interests, qualification status).
10. Children's Privacy
AccreditedNow.org is intended for adults aged 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from individuals under 18 years of age. If we become aware that we have collected personal information from a minor we will delete it immediately. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a minor please contact us at info@accreditednow.org.
11. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technology, legal requirements, or other factors. When we make material changes we will:
- Update the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page
- Send an email notification to subscribers on our list
- Post a prominent notice on our website for 30 days
Your continued use of AccreditedNow.org after the effective date of any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated Privacy Policy. We encourage you to review this page periodically.
12. Contact Us
If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our data practices please contact us:
AccreditedNow LLC
State of Formation: Indiana
Email: info [at] accreditednow.org
Opt-Out Requests: optout [at] accreditednow.org
Website: AccreditedNow.org
We will respond to all privacy-related inquiries within 10 business days.