Terms

People who want to give — funders — put money into a shared pool. When that pool reaches a set size it is shared out among members, picked at random. Joining is free and staying is free. There is nothing to buy at any point. When a claim is paid, CatchFlu may send a small percentage of it to a wallet set by the operator, to keep the platform running. Your wallet shows that cut — and what you receive — before you tap Claim.

It is not a lottery, a competition, an investment, a savings account or a loan. You are not buying a chance at anything and nothing here earns a return. Money that reaches you is a gift from strangers who chose to fund the pool.

A Share is your slice of a share-out that has not happened yet. Until a share-out locks, it can change size or vanish altogether — when new funding arrives every existing slice is rescaled. Read a Share as a maybe, never as a balance.

Who gets one is random, and so is how big it is — two people in the same share-out can hold very different slices. Every draw starts fresh: existing Shares are cleared and drawn again, so having held one last time neither helps you nor counts against you. Admins are excluded from the draw and cannot hold a Share.

How many members a draw picks is a setting we can move rather than a promise. It is set generously today, so missing a round is the exception rather than the rule — but no round is guaranteed to include you, and you have to be eligible to be in it at all.

When a share-out locks, whatever your Share came to becomes claimable and you have 30 days. Miss that window and it returns to the pool for the next share-out. We will not chase you about it, so the reminder is this sentence.

Payouts are sent as ETH on the Base network to the wallet address you give us. Getting that address right is yours to do: a payout sent to a mistyped address cannot be reversed or recovered, by us or by anyone. Check it before you claim.

If a platform cut is on, that percentage is taken when the claim is sent, not when the giveaway locks. The amount on your claim is still the full share; what reaches your wallet is the rest.

Worth stating plainly, because the rest of the site is short on it. These come out before members are paid:

• Moving money on a network costs a fee, and those fees are paid out of the pool.
• CatchFlu may keep a portion of the posted pool. That portion never enters the pool and is never paid out to anyone.
• A percentage of each claim may be sent to a platform wallet when you withdraw, if the operator has turned that on. That is a split of your claim, not a new deduction from the pool.

The percentage shown on your Share is already scaled to what is actually left after keep and transfer fees, so the number you are shown is the number locked for you. The platform cut, if any, is taken later when you claim.

CatchFlu is in preview. Funding is simulated: the amounts on the site are not real money and no real payout comes out of them. The server refuses to send a real payout unless real funding has actually arrived, so a simulated pool cannot quietly become a real one.

When that changes, this page changes with it and the site will say so where you cannot miss it.

One email, one account. If we find you running more than one you are banned permanently — every account you hold, no appeal and no second chance.

This is the only rule enforced that harshly, and the reason is simple: somebody holding ten accounts is taking ten people’s worth of chance away from everyone else. It is the one thing that would make the whole idea pointless.

Open the app at least once every 45 days and you stay in the draw. Go quiet for longer and you stop being eligible for Shares until you come back — no penalty, and nothing you already hold is taken from you.

Sharing your link never makes a Share likelier or bigger, for you or for the person you brought. It does exactly one thing: every referral who has been active in the last 45 days keeps your sneeze on the sneeze page longer. If anyone tells you referrals buy Shares here, they are wrong.

Funding is a gift to strangers. It does not get you a Share, better odds, priority, a say in who receives, or anything else — by design. If that is not what you want from your money, do not fund.

Contributions are not refundable. Once money is in it is committed to being given away; we cannot pull it back out of a share-out and will not try. Do not fund more than you are content never to see again.

A sneeze is a short public message. Anyone can read it, it lasts a while, and then it leaves the page and is deleted from our servers for good a short time later. Post one and you are publishing it: your username sits next to it.

Keep it decent. Nothing that is:

• illegal, or encouraging something illegal
• threatening, or abusive towards a person or a group
• somebody else’s private information
• spam, advertising, or a link to either
• not yours to publish

Anyone can react to a sneeze once. A smile adds time; a mask takes the same amount away. Enough masks can end it immediately. We can also remove any sneeze ourselves, at any time, without explaining why.

You can close your account whenever you like, from your account page. Closing drops any Share you hold — it is not money, and leaving it parked on somebody who has gone keeps everyone still here scaled down to make room for it.

If you are owed a claim you cannot close yet. Claim it first, then close, so nothing is left waiting for an account that can no longer be signed into.

Your email address stays reserved permanently after closing, and so does the username you had at the time. That is deliberate: it is what stops a closed account being reopened as a second one, and what stops someone else becoming you. Names you left before closing can be taken. It also means you cannot rejoin later with the same email. If you closed by mistake, mail support@catchflu.org — reopening it is something only we can do.

We can suspend or close an account we believe is gaming the draw, and we can remove anything posted here. Where we can explain ourselves we will, but we are not going to publish a playbook for getting around the checks.

CatchFlu is young and will change. We can adjust how often share-outs happen, the size a pool must reach, how long sneezes live and how much is kept — and we can stop running it altogether. Changes that affect what you are owed will be announced on the site before they take effect.

There is money involved, so accounts are for adults. By joining you are confirming you are 18 or older.

CatchFlu is provided as it is. We work hard at keeping the books correct and the site up, and we still do not promise it will always be available, that a share-out will happen on any particular day, or that you will ever receive anything at all. No draw is guaranteed to include you, and when one does, the size of your slice is random. That is what random means.

Mail support@catchflu.org. A real person reads it.