Account blocked - Brave the "de-"centralized browser?

After spending hours of hours to promote this Browser within several global companies my account just got blocked without any reasons. I held speeches about this browser to promote it in the belief to do the right thing. To drive our society into another, better direction than we know nowadays. Away from the centralized world towards a better decentralized world where we trust in rules set beforehand and without a central entity.

But honestly, now after Brave just blocked my account without any reason and without telling me why, I deeply think that this project is heading towards a wrong direction. Almost like the ICO scam they held last year. Early adopters will remember. I even tried to write them via mail to support+publishers@basicattentiontoken.org but don’t get any response.

This scam might work for a few months, even a year. But the fundamentals will judge over the long-term perspectives. In my opinion such behaviour isn’t acceptable and the community/world won’t respect a project like this (especially in the launch phase).
You’re by far not better than Google etc. It’s sad to see such a promising project driving itself to the ground. Wish you luck!!

Maybe someone made the same experiences?

Earned money Brave just holds back (must be even more right now):

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I’m sorry this happened to you @blum_3.

cc @Asad @nejczdovc @Mattches for help.

Hi @blum_3,

Please zip an email my way to asad@brave.com. In your email, please include the email address that your publishers account is registered to and I’ll take a look into your account.

Zipped you a mail as I also did a few days before to support+publishers@basicattentiontoken.org
Hope it helps…

Still not solved… It’s really annoying. Don’t know what to do anymore. You guys can’t do this to your community!

@Asad: Could you please do whatever you need to do to get my account back? No, reactions isn’t the way how you should treat your community. What’s wrong with you guys? I can’t belive that you’re actually doing this. This is so unprofessional!

Interesting case. So if a majority of users is using Brave to browser the web someday, the guys behind BAT will control every publishers accounts and every publisher will depend on the Brave team to pay out their tokens? This definitely isn’t how I understood this would work. If making money from publishing via BAT depends on having a centralized account that is controlled by the Brave team, we’ll end up in the same place we are today with Google controlling everyone’s ad revenue.

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Yes, all publishers depend on the mood and habits of the Brave team to release the tokens. In my case they still block the access to my tokens.
But now comes the best part: They claim to be the browser which respects the privacy of their users. But in the background, they track you down and ask you why you did this and that and find it suspicious that I did certain things. This is a no-go to me. They now even would like to have my personal materials like my presentation before even thinking about unlocking my account. I don’t share my personal material on which I worked for days with someone I don’t know and at the end after such actions can’t trust (send them a screenshot of my PowerPoint with the content, plus other things). No reaction yet…

Guys, honestly! Don’t mess around with your community like this!

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<[The Br <[The Brave Community] [Publishers]> ave.Com

Keep you updated here on this topic. The Brave team keeps ignoring me even after sending them personal documents. Decentralization looks different to me…

Dear blum_3,

Thank you for your engagement with Brave and your patience while we review your case. We have sent you a longer email privately. This public post is abridged and does not include the personal information you sent us privately.

The activity on your Brave Publishers account was extremely unusual. It is unusual that 250 people independently pinned the entirety of their Brave contributions to your YouTube channel which has minimal content. It is also unusual that you referred hundreds of people to download and install Brave and those installs all exhibited identical and abnormal characteristics.

These events led our automatic anti-fraud system to flag your account. When this happens, our review committee follows up to see if the automated system might have made a mistake. We consider all sorts of factors and attempt to find reasonable explanations for unusual activity on a publisher’s account. Our suspensions average less than 0.3% of our total account base on a monthly basis. In more than half of those few cases, an email conversation explains the unusual behavior, and the account is restored.

In our email discussion, you also offered other explanations for why this activity might be legitimate. The explanations you offered do not match the events we observed. We were unable to find a legitimate explanation for the activity on your account — activity which is extremely anomalous, and consistent with an attempt at fraud. We reasonably concluded that this activity was not legitimate, and that it indicated you are not complying with the terms of the Publishers site and of the referral promotion.

We are obliged to use good judgement in these cases to protect the interests of the legitimate publishers who operate YouTube accounts, Twitch channels and websites — publishers who receive the lion’s share of users’ attention and therefore should receive the lion’s share of their contributions.

Thank you,

Asad & the Brave Publishers Team

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Asad, could you respond to some of the other questions raised in this thread? Why is your team controlling access to the BAT tokens earned by publishers? Does this mean everyone’s BAT wallet is actually a hosted wallet that the BAT developers hold the keys for? If that’s the case, I think we’ve learned with Bitcoin that you never really own your tokens unless you are the only one who has the secret keys. In this case, your team seems to host every wallet and control all the keys, which gives you the authority to decide which publisher is worthy of my tokens. How does this go together with the supposedly decentralized nature of the payment systems Brave seems to promote?

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They just keep ignoring the community.

Brave is the biggest fraud under the shield of decentralization. It’s still the same fraud as it was during their ICO (early adopters will remember). Think about it…

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lol. They caught you cheating, yet they are the “biggest fraud”?

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Do you really belief this story?!

They can tell the community whatever they want and people like you just belief it. Please just use 1% of your brain power and think about it. The “decentralized browser that respects your privacy” tracks you down to lock your earned tokens. Got it? :wink:

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What answer do you expect from the admin? They ignore this topic to no start the discussion about their real fundamentals. It might be uncomfortable…

The better option is to just leave it and hide it under the carpet and/or delete the whole topic. Sad but true…
Just dig a bit deeper and you’ll find some very ugly things (hint: ICO).

This has no bearing on the decentralized nature of Brave Rewards. Under our terms of service, Brave reserves the right to protect itself and its users against fraudulent activity.

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@ada88888, easy with the caps lock.

@blum_3, what are you talking about? If you’ll scroll up, you’ll see that mods and team members have responded to this thread. @Asad’s earlier reply should have addressed any questions with respect to this thread:

Additionally, you were asked to email Publishers Support for further assistance. Yet somehow this is “hiding it under the carpet”? Also, if you haven’t noticed, nobody deleted this thread or hid it from view. We are not attempting to skirt the truth or silence anyone who has negative feedback.

Here’s the deal in very plain English:
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there are some bad people in the world. These bad people have often (and will continue to) tried to take advantage of the BAT/rewards system. We, as a company, have to account for this type of activity and, as @Asad once again said,

That’s it. Everything else you mentioned is either false or unfounded. If you have a legitimate complaint that you can backup and verify without leaning on false accusations we’re more than happy to listen. But this thread has become less than constructive. I will leave it open for the time being for anyone interested in commenting.

Please remember to stay civil and keep conversation constructive.

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Conversation was not kept civil or constructive.