Screenshots get torn apart in UAE courts.
ProofSnap doesn't.

ProofSnap is a Chrome extension that captures web pages as legal evidence with blockchain timestamping, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of digital evidence.

ProofSnap uses OpenTimestamps to anchor a SHA-256 hash of your evidence to the Bitcoin blockchain, creating a cryptographic proof of when the capture was made. This timestamp is independently verifiable and cannot be backdated or tampered with, providing independently checkable proof that your evidence existed at a specific point in time.

ProofSnap includes a 7-day free trial with all plans. The trial requires a credit card, and you are not charged if you cancel before it ends. Choose from flexible monthly or annual subscriptions: Essential, $8.99 per month or $80 per year; Professional, $16.99 per month or $160 per year; Enterprise, $28.99 per month or $280 per year. Annual plans save 20%.

ProofSnap generates forensically sound evidence with cryptographic proofs aligned with eIDAS 2 standards for qualified timestamps and digital signatures. Admissibility depends on jurisdiction and specific legal requirements. Consult a UAE advocate about your own case.

Regular screenshots can be challenged in court because they carry no proof of when they were taken or whether they have been altered. In the UAE the first half of that problem is already solved for you: Article 55 of Federal Decree-Law 35/2022 gives electronic evidence the same legal effect as written evidence, so a screenshot gets in. What remains is the half that decides cases. Because the material is on the same footing as a written document, the way to attack it is to allege it was altered, and a plain image gives you nothing to answer that with. Reliability, integrity and traceability are what a UAE court weighs, and each of them is a technical fact you can demonstrate or fail to demonstrate.

ProofSnap addresses this by creating a forensic evidence package containing a SHA-256 hash proving the content has not been modified, an RSA-4096 digital signature for authenticity, an eIDAS qualified timestamp issued by Disig a.s., a Qualified Trust Service Provider on the EU Trusted List, a Bitcoin blockchain anchor, and full metadata including the URL and the capture time in UTC. The presumption goes to the time and the integrity of the data rather than to admissibility generally or to the truth of what the page said, so a court or an adjudicator still weighs the evidence. What it removes is the argument about when the capture was made and whether it changed afterwards.

A lot of UAE legal writing still says online content has to be notarised before a court will take it. Read Federal Decree-Law 35/2022 and that is not what it requires. Article 55 gives electronic evidence the same legal effect as written evidence where the requirements of the law are met, with no notarial step in the way. Notarisation is sometimes useful, but it is not the gate people think it is.

It also solves a different problem from the one you have. Notarial attestation proves who appeared before the notary and when, not that the bytes never changed afterwards. A notary does not hash your file, and nobody can recompute a notarial seal months later to show the screenshot is byte-identical to what was captured. Add the practical problem: a Dubai notary appointment costs more than the capture and takes longer than the content usually survives, and the page you are trying to preserve can be edited or deleted while you are waiting for the slot.

A ProofSnap package attacks the integrity question directly, in seconds, for a fraction of the cost: a SHA-256 hash of every file, an RSA-4096 signed manifest, the public key, a chain of custody and a verification script that any court-appointed expert or opposing advocate can run themselves. If your matter also needs a notary for some separate reason, the two are not alternatives and you can do both.

ProofSnap uses three layers of cryptographic protection:

1. SHA-256 Hashing: Every file in the evidence package is hashed. Changing even a single pixel or character produces a completely different hash, making any tampering immediately detectable.
2. Digital Signature: The manifest (listing all files and their hashes) is digitally signed with a private key. The corresponding public key is included for anyone to verify authenticity.
3. Blockchain Timestamp: The manifest hash is anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps, creating an immutable record of when the evidence was captured. This timestamp cannot be forged or backdated.

Together, these mechanisms create a chain of integrity that proves that the evidence is authentic and unaltered, and that it was captured at a specific point in time.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, known as eIDAS 2, will be fully rolled out by the end of 2026, establishing stricter standards for electronic identification, digital signatures, and qualified electronic timestamps across all EU member states.

Under Article 41(2), a qualified electronic time stamp shall enjoy the presumption of the accuracy of the date and the time it indicates and the integrity of the data to which the date and time are bound. That presumption operates in the European Union. It does not reach the UAE, which has its own trust services regime under Federal Decree-Law 46/2021, supervised by the TDRA, so before a UAE court the qualified timestamp is corroboration of time and integrity rather than a statutory presumption. Admissibility itself is not the problem here: Article 55 of Federal Decree-Law 35/2022 already gives electronic evidence the same legal effect as written evidence.

ProofSnap's cryptographic proofs align with eIDAS 2 requirements: SHA-256 hashing for data integrity, RSA-4096 digital signatures for authenticity, and blockchain timestamps via OpenTimestamps for independent time verification. Each of those is verifiable offline by anyone, which is what makes the package useful in a UAE proceeding and, where a matter also touches Europe, in an EU one.

Yes, and that is the part people get wrong. Federal Decree-Law 35/2022 on Evidence in Civil and Commercial Transactions defines electronic evidence at Article 53 as evidence obtained from data or information generated, stored, extracted, copied, sent, communicated or received through information technology and capable of being rendered in a perceivable form. Article 54 lists the forms it takes, including electronic records, documents, signatures, seals, correspondence and modern means of communication, and Article 55 gives it the same legal effect as written evidence where the requirements of the law are met. An email, a WhatsApp thread and a captured web page all sit inside that.

So the argument you will actually face is not whether your screenshot is admissible. It is what it is worth, which turns on reliability, integrity and traceability: when the record was created, where it came from, whether it was altered, and whether any of that can be checked by someone other than you. A bare screenshot answers none of those. A package with a SHA-256 hash of every file, an RSA-4096 signed manifest, a chain of custody and a verification script answers all four, and it does so in a form a court-appointed expert can confirm without taking your word for anything.

Every checklist you will find says the same thing and then stops: bring your Emirates ID, the employment contract and the WPS salary transfer records, plus screenshots of anything in dispute and your written correspondence with the employer. The last two are the ones nobody explains, and they are the ones that decide the file, because MOHRE and the Court of First Instance both work from documents rather than from your account of events.

Work through it in this order while you still have access:

1. The employment contract and every amendment, offer letter and job title change.
2. Payslips and the salary transfer records, which also fix your service period for an end-of-service gratuity dispute.
3. The HR portal entries: leave balance, absence records, warnings, appraisals.
4. The internal messages that matter, whether email, Teams, Slack or WhatsApp with your manager.
5. The rota or shift system, if your claim turns on hours worked.
6. The message or letter that ended the employment, and anything said about the reason.

Capture your own employment records while you still have access, because the accounts holding them close on your last day and the residency timeline can end your stay before the dispute ends. Take only what relates to your own employment and your own terms. Copying employer data beyond that is a separate problem you do not want, and an advocate will tell you where the line sits.

It starts at MOHRE, not in a courtroom. Under Article 54 of the Labour Law as amended by Federal Decree-Law 9/2024, in force since 30 August 2024, the Ministry decides the dispute itself where the claim does not exceed AED 50,000, and that decision carries the force of a writ of execution, so the successful party can go straight to enforcement. A party who disagrees has 15 working days from notification to bring the dispute before the competent Court of First Instance, and that judgment is final. Larger claims go to the court from the outset. Note that an earlier version of this regime, under Federal Decree-Law 20/2023, sent the challenge to the Labour Court of Appeal instead; a lot of commentary online still describes that older position.

Capture before you file, because the process moves faster than your access lasts. The employment contract and any amendment, the offer letter, payslips and the salary transfer records, the rota or shift system, the internal messages about performance or conduct, the HR portal entries and the message that ended the employment. Nearly all of it sits in systems switched off on your last day, and in the UAE the visa timeline can end your stay before the dispute ends. Take only what relates to your own employment, capture it while you still have access, and keep the package sealed.

Capture first, report second. The UAE eCrime channel is designed around attachments: you sign in with UAE Pass and submit the material with the report. That is convenient, and it is also the trap, because the moment you report, the takedown begins. Fake investment dashboards, cloned bank pages, courier notification sites and WhatsApp trading groups are gone within days of the first complaint, along with the account you were dealing with.

Capture each element as its own package: the website or dashboard, the message thread including the phone number and profile, the payment instruction, the transaction confirmation and any invoice or contract you were sent. ProofSnap records the page source and the DOM text alongside the image, so a page that later disappears is still readable in full rather than surviving only as a picture. Keep the packages after you report as well, because a criminal complaint, a bank dispute and any civil recovery all draw on the same file at different times.

That is the objection every screenshot invites, and with a plain image there is no answer to it beyond your own word. In the UAE the allegation usually arrives as a claim of forgery, which is a serious accusation and one a court will take seriously in both directions. A picture gives you nothing to meet it with.

A ProofSnap package answers the objection from the file. Every file carries a SHA-256 hash, the manifest listing those hashes is signed with an RSA-4096 key, the public key travels with the package, and the verification scripts recompute all of it in front of whoever is asking. Change one pixel and the hash no longer matches. Onshore, that is what a court-appointed expert needs in order to report on integrity. In the DIFC or ADGM it is what the other side's lawyer runs and gets nowhere with.

Three things. First, the route: online defamation and insult fall under Article 43 of Federal Decree-Law 34/2021 on countering rumours and cybercrime, so you are filing a criminal complaint with the police or the public prosecution rather than starting a civil action, and UAE courts have treated a post made from a personal account as published to the public. Second, the clock: under Article 11 of Federal Decree-Law 38/2022 a complaint is not accepted more than three months after you became aware of both the offence and the person who committed it. That is a short window for material that can be deleted at any moment.

Third, and most often missed, the risk runs both ways. Because insult and defamation are criminal here, publishing your own accusation online can put you on the receiving end of a complaint. The safe sequence is to capture the post, the profile, the thread and any message privately, as a sealed package with hashes and a timestamp, say nothing publicly, and hand the package to the police, the prosecution or a UAE advocate. ProofSnap is built for exactly that: a record you can give to a decision-maker without publishing a word yourself.

Forensic mode is an optional, deeper form of capture included in the Professional, Enterprise and Company plans (not in Essential or the SnapPacks).

It adds a complete archive of the page's network layer: every HTTP request and response (network.har), a WARC copy of the page, all loaded resources, and the full TLS certificate chain. To capture that it attaches the debugger (the browser shows a "being debugged" banner).

Every one of those files is hashed into the RSA-4096 signed manifest, so the OpenTimestamps blockchain anchor and the eIDAS qualified timestamp cover the network archive exactly as they cover the screenshot.