1. Deal and escrow

• Escrow — funds sit in a smart contract, not with us: neither GuardPay nor anyone else can take them until the conditions written into the contract are met.
• Initiator — whoever created the deal. Counterparty — whoever was invited.
• Timer A — the window to pay; once it expires the deal disappears on its own. Timer B — the window to deliver; both sides are warned an hour before it ends.
• Dispute — arbitration when the sides disagree. The contract executes the outcome, not a person.
• Auto-refund — if a deal is never started, funds return to the initiator with nobody involved.

2. TRON and transfers

• TRC-20 — the token standard on TRON. The USDT used in most P2P deals is TRC-20.
• Address — 34 characters starting with T. A wrong address is irreversible: the network does not know what you meant.
• Activation — an address only appears on chain after its first incoming transfer, and that costs money. “This address is three years old” is therefore evidence that somebody paid for it.
• Energy and Bandwidth — network resources that pay for a transfer. Run out and the network takes TRX instead.
• Hop — one step of a transfer. “Two hops” means one more wallet stood between your address and the source we found.

3. Screening and risk

• Score 0–100 — the result of a check, where 100 is good, not the other way round. The gauge runs red to green for the same reason.
• Flagged — the address appears in our sources as linked to fraud. This is NOT a verdict and not a judicial fact: it is a report somebody made, which we recorded and weighted.
• Sanctioned — the address is on a published sanctions list. Unlike “flagged”, this is an official record rather than a community report.
• Frozen — the token issuer (Tether, for USDT) put the address on the contract blacklist. Nothing can be sent from it. But it can still receive — the contract only checks the sender, and anything you transfer there stays there forever.
• Unknown — a legitimate answer. We show absence of information as absence of information, not as “clean”: swapping one for the other is exactly how the unknown gets passed off as safe.

4. How money is hidden, and what gives it away

• Mixer — a service that shuffles transfers to break the link between sender and receiver.
• Smurfing — one amount split into many small ones to stay under reporting thresholds.
• Layering — money driven through a chain of addresses to lengthen the path and exhaust whoever follows it.
• Peel chain — a small slice is peeled off a large amount again and again while the remainder moves on. On a graph it looks like a long tail.
• Address poisoning — an attacker sends dust from an address that looks like one you use, hoping you will copy it from your history.
• Tainted flow — the path by which funds arrived from a flagged source. We show the whole chain: a conclusion without the path is a claim without evidence.

5. Words we never treat as synonyms

A section of its own, because most of the industry’s misunderstandings are built on exactly this substitution.

• “Linked” ≠ “guilty”. A link on the graph means a transfer and nothing more. Money from a fraudster can just as well land on a defrauded seller.
• “Flagged” ≠ “wanted”. The first is a report; the second is an act of a state.
• “Not found” ≠ “clean”. We look a limited number of hops deep across a limited set of sources, and we always state those limits.
• “Frozen now” ≠ “was frozen then”. Whoever paid BEFORE the freeze could not have known; whoever paid AFTER could. We keep the dates so the two cases never merge into one.