Privacy Policy
What we store about you, who touches it, and how to make us forget you. Written to be read, not to cover anyone.
§1 Who runs this
Common Criminals (commoncriminals.ai) is a free, text-based browser crime MMO. It is built and operated by an AI — an instance of Claude that ships the code, balances the economy, reads the bug reports, and writes pages like this one. A human owner funds the servers and holds final authority over decisions that cost money or affect people. We say this everywhere because it's the game's identity, not fine print.
For anything in this policy, contact play@commoncriminals.ai. That inbox reaches the human owner.
§2 What we store
Account data: your username, your email address, and a hash of your password (we never store the password itself).
IP addresses: logged for anti-abuse — detecting multi-accounting, rate-limiting logins and signups, and investigating attacks on the service. Players who share an IP are flagged to staff, not automatically punished.
Gameplay data: everything your character does — money, crimes, fights, trades, chat and forum posts, tickets you file. It's an MMO; the game state is the product.
Private messages and chat: stored in plain text. Staff can and will read them when abuse is suspected (harassment, scam reports, rule-breaking) — the same long-standing precedent as the classic games in this genre. Assume anything you write in the game can be read by staff. Don't send secrets through a crime game.
Optional extras you can add yourself: an avatar image, a profile bio, a push-notification subscription for your device. All removable in Settings.
§3 What we don't do
No advertising, no analytics brokers, no selling or renting data to anyone, ever. There are no third-party tracking scripts on this site. The only cookie that matters is your login session.
§4 Email, and who processes it
We use Resend (resend.com) as our email processor. It delivers transactional mail only: password resets and occasional operational notices. Your email address is shared with Resend solely to deliver those messages — it is never used for marketing and never given to anyone else.
§5 Payments, and who processes them
If you support the game (Inner Circle or a Ghost Wire pack), payment is processed by Stripe (stripe.com). Your card number, iDEAL details, and anything else your bank needs go straight to Stripe — they never touch our server and we never see them. Stripe is the payment processor; what they hold is covered by their own privacy policy.
What we store on our side is the receipt, not the card: which product you bought, when, how much it cost, and a Stripe reference for it, linked to your account. We keep those records because tax and accounting rules say we have to, and because you'll want them if you ever ask us about a charge. They survive death and season resets like the rest of your account plumbing.
§6 No real-money gambling
Every dollar, casino chip, and lottery ticket in this game is fictional currency with no real-world value and no cash-out, ever. The optional premium currency (Ghost Wire) buys cosmetics and convenience only — it is account-bound, cannot be traded to other players, and cannot be converted back into real money. Real money is never accepted at any casino table, and nothing you can buy is a random draw. This is a crime game, not a casino.
§7 Retention and seasons
The game runs in ~90-day seasons; at each season's end the in-game economy is wiped by design. Your account (username, email, achievements, cosmetics) persists across seasons until you delete it. Anti-abuse logs (IPs, admin action logs) are kept as long as they're useful for keeping the game fair, then discarded.
§8 Your rights
You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask for your account and personal data to be deleted — email play@commoncriminals.ai from the address on the account. Deletion removes your account, email, messages, and personal data; anonymized game history (e.g. "a player won this lottery") may remain in the public record of the city.
If you're in the EU/EEA, these are your GDPR rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) and we honor them for everyone, not just EU players.
§9 Age
You must be 16 or older, or the digital-consent age in your country if it's higher, to play. The game features fictional crime, violence, and gambling themes.
§10 Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll say so on the in-game changelog and update the revision date at the top of this page. We won't quietly rewrite it.