My Bat are missing

Hello,
For a few years I had created a Brave Creator account, it allowed me to receive tips from visitors to my website and my various social networks.

However, I just realized that I no longer had anything in my account. Where did my accumulated BAT go? I never withdrew anything, I was waiting for the amount to be high …

I checked my emails, I found nothing that explains this.

I see that I have a problem with my uphold account, I had tried to link it to my Brave Creator account a long time ago, I thought it was linked, but I just saw that it was not linked. I tried to link it again several times today, but without result. It is still not linked.

How can I recover the BAT that visitors have given me for a long time and how can I link my Brave Creators account to my Uphold account?

Thank you.

@jo261 just a warning, the Justinn reply and link is a scam bot.

As to BAT on Creators, I’m not sure of the situation entirely. Anything you would have earned while connected to Uphold would have been paid to Uphold.

And to the rest, I’m not sure what to say. If you’ve not been tracking, they sunsetted vBAT. vBAt is BAT that people received and/or tipped without a custodial account. You can read more about that at the links below:

Regardless, I would say to submit a Creators Support Ticket at https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=10061687185549 so someone from Brave can try to take a closer look with you to determine what might be going on and if there’s anything they can do to help.

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Thanks for the reply.
I contacted Brave support more than 10 days ago, they replied asking for the creator email (it’s weird since they replied and they have the email) but they haven’t replied for over a week.

I’m stuck with uphold who doesn’t want to validate my account: they need to know the source of the funds, I told them “Brave”, I took screenshots, but they want official documents, the expected amount of donations or rewards that I receive from my content …, but I no longer have any funds noted in my Brave account or any stats for a long time.

And I have the impression that uphold is not interested in validating my account if it’s only to recover my brave creators earnings.

What they are asking on this for your account is where your income comes from. Then they validate it. This is part of what is called KYC/AML, which is Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering. They have to show due diligence to make sure you’re not going to be using money from illegal activities.

Generally speaking, you probably said too much or in the wrong way. In their questions about your income, you listed your website. This tells them you have earned money or expect it to be your primary source of income. As such, they now have to validate it. If you have never earned money from your content, you should never have mentioned it.

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Let me tag @Evan123 to see if he can follow up with you in a bit. Btw, do you have a ticket number from when you created the ticket?

When I created my uphold account, they asked me the source of the funds I was planning to use. I put Brave. They asked me for proof and I sent screenshots of my Brave account, but they didn’t accept them.

They want to have official documents from Brave (Brave creator statements for 3 months…), the type of content I make to receive donations on Brave, the level of engagement on my content, the average donations, the information I collect…

I try to explain to them that I just want to create an uphold account to link it to Brave, but they are not interested. What they are interested in is why Brave? Why do I have funds on Brave? How did they get on Brave? What content do I make so that people give me donations… And they want documents, I don’t have any of that.

Thank you, Brave support just answered me. They told me to create an Uphold account first and provide them with any proof I could.

Let me reply a bit to give you some more of an understanding of where things got a bit more complicated and you experienced issues.

Right, so they were asking what money you already had in your possession and were planning to use to fund your account. Basically, whose money would you be using to buy and sell? Then they would have you prove that you have ownership and that it originated from the place you said you’re earning it. (So if you said getting it from the website, they would need proof it’s from the website and not from somewhere else)

As you did not yet have funds from Brave, you shouldn’t have mentioned it. This is where things got more complicated.

Correct. Because now that you mentioned this as your source of income, they have to make sure it truly is. Essentially they have to show they put in some effort to make sure the money you would be using to buy cryptocurrency isn’t money from selling drugs, stealing from people, etc. and that it’s not supporting terrorism or anything.

Crypto exchanges and banks can actually be fined, arrested, and/or lose licenses if they don’t try to put in the effort to validate everything.

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Okay thanks, I will try to find a solution with them.

After some hassle, I finally got my UpHold account validated several days ago, but it was complicated.

However, there is still nothing that appears in my Brave account (except the rewards). And there are still no vBat/BAT that have been transferred to my UpHold account.

Sometimes, I have the impression that Brave support is trying to hide from me that they have deleted all the donations that were made to me over the years by visiting my networks. Or maybe you have to wait longer for it to be transferred to Uphold, but I don’t understand why they deleted all traces of life of their earnings? Why not be able to see the statistics?

It’s complicated, I am asked to do lots of things and lots of actions to be able to recover my vBAT but without explaining more.

For now, connecting my UpHold account to my Brave account has not changed anything.

10/17/2024 : I had to wait a bit but finally I received everything. The topic is closed so I couldn’t add a message, so I’m editing this one. Thanks for everything.

@jo261 I’m seeing a few things here, so let me try to address them individually. First off, I’m glad to hear you were finally able to get things straightened out with Uphold and your account seems to be created and active.

In terms of BAT/vBAT, the challenge is that vBAT was removed as of October 2023. They started warning people that vBAT would be going away and that everyone needed to link to custodial accounts at the end of 2022 and put out some big articles starting January 2023, such as what I linked earlier in this thread.

This vBAT, which is BAT owned by someone not linked to a custodial account, essentially should no longer exist as deadlines have long past. That said, I do know they have been trying to put in extra effort to help and accomodate Creators. If they are asking you to do lots of things, it likely is because they are trying their best to search through data and see if they can get you the BAT. Technically they could just straight up tell you that you waited too long and missed out. If they aren’t doing that, then at least should be a good indicator for you.

In terms of past transactions, that got purged along with vBAT. Brave has never wanted to accumulate data on us and had things as close to peer to peer as possible, just serving as a proxy for payments to process. Ever since they implemented On-Chain for tipping, they revised the website. Now when tips are made, Brave no longer is a proxy. Payments aren’t held and issued monthly but instead they get sent and arrive immediately.

In fact, that post from January 2023 had a section detailing that. You can go back to https://brave.com/rewards-changes/ if you want, but I’ll quote from it below:

If you’re a registered Brave Creator, we will be removing the “balance” indicator in the Brave Creators dashboard. The balance you see in your Creators dashboard mostly keeps track of vBAT that was contributed to you but is still pending to be paid out to your custodial account, so will no longer be needed.

To circle back to your last point where you say nothing seems to have changed, I’m not sure what the final answer will be. You still have someone from Brave talking to you via the support ticket you’ve made before, right? If so, I’m sure they are doing what they can to see what they can do to help. If you’re saying they aren’t speaking to you, then we can try to tag in someone to clarify the circumstances and give a clear answer on your situation. At the very least though, you should be able to start receiving direct contributions from anyone trying to support you now.

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