How closures and status changes are recorded

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When a financial service closes, merges, is renamed, or has its status changed by a regulator, that is worth recording. People search for services that no longer exist, and finding nothing is worse than finding an accurate note about what happened.

The archive uses a fixed vocabulary: closed, merged, renamed, unavailable, warning, historical. That list is enforced in the import contract, so a record carrying any other label is rejected before it can be created.

The word scam is not in that list and cannot be entered. It is not a category here, and no automated process is permitted to generate one — claims beginning with warning, scam, fraud, safety, or closure are refused outright by the enrichment boundary rather than flagged for review. A plausible-looking generated accusation is harder for a reviewer to catch than an obvious blank, and the consequences of publishing one about a named real business are not symmetric with the cost of omitting it.

Every status record states what happened and when, with a source where one exists. Where the reason for a closure is not documented, the record says the status could be confirmed and nothing further is asserted. A lack of information is not evidence of wrongdoing, and an absence of reply from a company is not evidence of anything at all.

Each entry carries a standing note that a record here is not an allegation. Status labels describe what happened to a service. They do not imply wrongdoing by anyone involved in operating it.