With all respect, I think this advice is a bit out of touch. If they did nothing wrong, why would they be flagged in the first place? I did nothing wrong (that I can know of), yet I was flagged, I opened a ticket and I received the exact same template response that other forum members told me I would receive. It’s beyond frustrating and borderline insulting.
Normal activity can appear unusual. Below are two made up situations that I’m not sure if would actually apply to Brave, but it’s just to paint a picture.
Example 1:
User has had web browser for 1 year. Normally they are on the web browser for 3 hours a day. On occasion up to 8, but that’s it. Beyond that they sleep, work, and have a life.
One week, the User is on web browser for 10 hours a day, with some days of 14+ hours.
Is that week unusual? How about if what was a random schedule suddenly turned into routine hours, almost like a robot is controlling it? Unusual? This continues for months. Unusual?
Example 2
User has set their country to United Kingdom. They view ads and things go well. The desktop remains in the same location and this goes on for years. It might go elsewhere for a month or two, such as if a person is on vacation or a business trip, but the majority of time spent is United Kingdom.
Then one day, the IP address starts to change frequently. One day it’s United Kingdom, another day it’s United States. It may even go to other countries or random parts of the country. In fact, it went from England to California in just 30 minutes. Sound usual to you?
In its traveling, it’s viewing ads from each region which are supposed to only show to people who live in those countries. The system is set up to handle short vacations, to null out payments, but this is ongoing. It comes to a time that it’s seeing more ads from United States than it is from United Kingdom. Yet the country chosen is United Kingdom. Does this sound usual?
What you’ll see though is the system suspends the accounts on each for potential abuse or fraud. However, Example 1 may just be the person got fired from their job, they got married and now it’s two people using the device, etc. So they submit a support ticket and Brave staff looks through what they can to see if it seems to match with anything that is a deliberate abuse or if it seems like it’s really normal use. If they see it seems possible that it’s legitimate, they reinstate the account. Sometimes they give it back to someone who is abusing the system, but generally play it safe.
In Example 2, the person started using a VPN. Using a VPN to get to things like Netflix is fine, but this person is keeping the VPN active for countries that they don’t live in. Brave then makes a judgment call to determine if this is happening so the person can get more ads or what might be going on. You stand a higher risk of suspension remaning if you’re from a “poorer” country with little to no ads. That said, person in Example 2 seems like they really are just doing a lot of Netflix and all which they can’t access outside of VPN. The amount of ads they are viewing are small. So it’s determined that while it’s suspicious, the person doesn’t seem to be doing it to try to abuse Rewards but is just simply doing it to get content.
In closing
Those are two very bad examples of where things could be flagged but the User didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Though their activity could be seen as suspicious.
Now, I say bad example because I’ve seen Chriscat and others say that they can’t tell which ads each individual use. I also know that they can’t see much of our specific activity or anything. There’s a lot of privacy things where they say they don’t have access. Yet I know the system is able to detect and infer information. Only thing I don’t know is what they specifically can see and work with. I do know there are checks and balances for ad campaigns and our IP address. It’s just that Brave won’t ever fully reveal what they see and how they flag accounts. Yet based on when they used to give more information, we do know things like automation, using VPN to appear elsewhere, adding a lot of devices to an account, actively using devices for what is not common in a person, etc all were things that resulted in suspensions.
The VPN thing was especially the case if it was someone from a country like Philippines, Vietnam, India, etc where there weren’t a lot of ad campaigns or ad sales were low and these people were suddenly using VPN to appear as if they were in the United States, just so they can try to earn more money.
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@Saoiray , i appreciate the fact you are trying to keep the boat floating.
But i think i read most of the topics related to rewards(if there is an option to check that i really did, please check.) , and here is the ss
And if you want, i can share the 30 days activity, and there are mostly NTA(you were right), checked the sampson list with ads for my region, and there are several campaigns here, and i i count, i only received 5 notifications.
My settings are the same as before.
If i use daily the browser(part of my work), it means that i am classified as a bot? and that why maybe i get 0.0010 BAT per ad(ratio)? or i have chances to be flagged?
If brave considers that using the browser too much, then gladly i will switch to another to do my work, and keep brave only when i go to bathroom(and maybe i will get more).
P.S is not about the amount(no one gets rich or live from this), but it s kind weird this discrimination.
And i have to add that you earned in 1 month, what i earned in 6.
@Michael-Alexander Remind me, which country are you in?
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That show for your OS?
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That haven’t been running a long time to where you may have viewed the maximum allowable for that campaign?
To be clear, reason I ask that second point is like:
It started in January and maximum amount of times ads from the campaign can be seen is 44. So even though that shows up, I won’t be able to see those ads because I’ve likely maxed it out long ago. Or if you want an even bigger example:
That campaign is ridiculous. Running from 2021 to current. Maximum amount of times can view the ads are 30. So the overwhelming majority of us would have seen it the maximum amount of times a long time ago. With 3 per day cap and max of 30 times seen, means you could stop seeing that campaign after 10 days.
When people pick through them, you’ll see a lot of stuff like that. Some get silly, like:
Started last month, maximum amount of times you can see it is 8 at 2 per day. So in just 4 days, that campaign would essentially vanish.
So yeah, going through your list to see View Limits, how long they have been going on, and which OS they are targeting might help you narrow.
If NTP is primarily all you’re getting, then is question of whether notification settings are good or if there’s just not a lot of push notification (PN) ads in your area. Also, am sure you know, but if it says IC it’s Inline Content, which can appear randomly in Brave News.
This is great info, it might be worth pinning it so that people can understand the complexity involved. My main concern is the fact that many Brave supporters seem to be getting flagged in error and then losing faith in the project because there is little they can do about it. Brave Support on Twitter has offered to screen share with me to investigate in detail why I am flagged, and I do appreciate this. Perhaps a decidated appeals process would be a good idea for people who think they have been flagged in error.
@sonicdream I actually made a topic on it a while back. Used to link to it in my prior FAQ. I may add something like that again in the future. Though some things have changed, like payout status doesn’t show there anymore for some reason. Link to it if you’re curious though is Understanding Brave Ads Catalog Viewer. But then do have my current FAQ which covers a lot of details on things. Not sure if you had seen it, but if not, might want to look at PSA: Current FAQ
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That happens to me sometimes. Try refreshing or going back. I know according to https://brave.com/transparency/there should be 17 campaigns in Italy. But again, how many of them are for your OS and haven’t been around for a while?
Hi @Saoiray thanks for your reply. I don’t use a VPN, I use Brave in my laptop and my phone.
I submitted a ticket but I didn’t get any response yet.
So what can I do to recover my profile as it was before being flagged?
It’s my case. More than a year and now with the withdraw method to Uphold wallet flagged. I’ll open a ticket to solve this too. Regards!
Keep in mind that Brave only has about 4 people working Support overall. They also don’t work on the weekends. So if you just recently submitted your ticket, they likely haven’t even seen it yet. They try to respond to tickets within 3-5 business days. Response will come to your email, so make sure to check junk/spam.
If that much time (3-5 business days, meaning weekend and holiday doesn’t count) passes and you don’t hear anything, then post here on your topic here and include your ticket number that was provided to you when you created the ticket. This will just help so if Support sees it, they can try to pull it up and check the status and try to get an answer.
I received the response today:
"Sometimes your Brave Rewards profile can be “flagged”. That usually means our systems noticed some irregular activity associated with Brave Ads. “Irregular activity” is activity that would be considered unusual compared to an ordinary person using Brave Ads as part of their overall, everyday browsing experience.
We have reviewed the flag, and your Rewards profile will not be reinstated. It will remain flagged."
I have been using the Brave browser as usual for the past 2 years so I would like to understand what “irregluar activity” triggered the profile being flagged and why it will not be reinstated.
Thank you for your help.
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I received the same response about 10 days ago from Brave I’m on my laptop about 12 + hours a day and get about 30 ads in that time so I would like to know what the Irregular activity is too
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I had a response from J that said “…your Rewards profile will not be reinstated. It will remain flagged.” but closing with a “Thank you for understanding…”.
For two years I’ve been regularly using Brave for my watch, nothing more, and I’ve been flagged.
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Yep, just decided as well that not worth the time and frustration, for 50 cents a month(we are the testing department).
I keep Brave browser/wallet for the fact that it can show IPFS files, and i can interact with the wallet from the web3 domain.
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@Saoiray In their response they said that my profile has been flagged due to “Irregular activity” but I’m still wating for an anwer to find out more information about what is that “Irregular activity” because I have been using the browser as usual for the past 3 years.
You won’t get an answer on that. Policy is not to share what specifically got a person flagged. The only thing you can do is submit a Rewards Support Ticket at https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360001302431 to see if they’ll reinstate your account. They then investigate and either reinstate it or say after careful review that they have decided not to reinstate the account. If it’s the latter, it means that specific Rewards profile is permanently suspended.
Requested a DM @H462.
I can’t speak for all the individual cases in this thread, but this should be resolved for some of you. Thanks!
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I can confirm, it seems I am no longer flagged. I connected my Rewards to Uphold just now and it worked. Maybe you guys changed something. I’m very happy and grateful to be able to participate in the attention economy again!
They never locked anyone’s funds. The flag just suspends the ability to earn BAT from Rewards. It takes time to develop a potentially revolutionary new technology like this.
I don’t think this is true. Your creator account is separate from Rewards. You can still receive tips to your creator account if your Rewards profile is flagged.