Violating Terms of Use/Terms of Service, including things like fraud and abuse.
Casually use your device and don’t expect this to be a crypto mining utility. This is just meant to be a privacy preserving web browser that earns you bits of extra money. Basically, don’t think about Rewards while using it and you’ll be fine. But if you put too much focus on trying to manipulate things and everything, you’ll have issues.
VPN alone isn’t enough to be flagged.
I didn’t engage in any fraud or abuse. I’ve been KYCed with Gemini from 2017, and I linked to Gemini as soon as that was available here. I haven’t done any manipulation. That’s why I’m telling you your tools are overzealous and you’re falsely flagging a lot of people.
VPN alone isn’t enough to be flagged.
Great then I should have zero reasons to be flagged.
@ConsciousPea1530 btw, did you just now get the reply to support ticket or are you coming here in regards to a response you got a few days or week(s) ago?
I got a response a few days ago. What is your point? I’m not checking my email and checking Brave rewards everyday. Like you said I just use it casually. So yes, I apologize if I didn’t respond to my ticket response within 15 minutes, and yes I believe your team got it wrong by flagging a lot of people incorrectly.
Point is what you can see in my original post here and the update. If it had been a while, it might have been worth creating a second ticket as they are doing deeper reviews. Like my main topic mentioned, they changed the antifraud system and it did flag more people than it should. So they are going through everything on a case by case basis while also fine-tuning things to make sure not to have as many false flags.
That said, if yours was new enough and they had done the deeper investigation, then unfortunately nobody is going to be able to do anything more.
Thank you for for that feedback. I am always afraid to create a second ticket as that’s often frowned upon. I replied to the original ticket’s response today, so hopefully they can look into it. I dunno though. I’m just super disappointed that as someone who has followed legitimate use is getting flagged and being told I have no recourse.
I received an answer by email concerning my rewards which I did not receive from May here is the email
same here… something seriously needs to change
I got the same basically. Look, I want to make it 100% clear that I believe people circumventing KYC, trying to spoof location and violating potential financial regulations… yes you should be banned. But even then I do believe Brave rewards staff owes an explanation to each person and explain what rule they broke.
Where possible, flags should be explained and the violation should be explained. Even if it truly is an egregious offense that cannot be reversed, the lack of transparency makes it look like random false positive bans or even a company banning users to save money.
With that said, I think its worth a reply to ask if they can re-investigate or at least explain why you are flagged/banned.
But you forget the point, how will you differentiate between a legitimate honest user and a bat farmer /scammer ?
There are ways I’m certain if you spend some time doing validation testing of whatever algorithms they are using to flag users. The fact they got so many wrong shows they probably did an overkill algorithm.
I also think at least for mobile users they need to be smarter. VPNs don’t automatically mean location spoofing. People use them legitimately. For instance apps like YoutubeTV don’t just use an IP address. they explicitly require location information from your phone–iOS and Android have core location services that look at not only cell network, WiFi networks, and other sensors to figure out where you are. If your IP is the US but you are actually in an ineligible country, YouTube TV won’t let you watch stuff. I’m not sure if jailbreaking/rooted storage bypasses things, but the # of users who could even go through that is significantly less than people who simply opt for IP spoofing.
YTTV doesn’t ban you for VPN. It just disallows you to watch if your phone is not in the US. So similarly with Brave, I think they need to do the same thing. Instead of banning everyone that uses VPN, figure out if they are cheating locations and then don’t let them get rewards if they aren’t in an actually eligible location.
That’s why I put the onus on them to figure these things out. Blanket overzealous flagging shows incompetence in development.
This is kind of a big part of debate. In speaking with them, they are actually quite confident in the accuracy of the flagged accounts. Essentially there was behavior that shouldn’t be done according to Terms. Of course, part of the issue is that they don’t let us know exactly what it’s measuring.
Why are accounts being reinstated then? It’s because being flagged is the same as getting suspended. They are hoping people will say “oh crap” and be more careful. You’ll even see posts from people where they have been flagged multiple times, such as at Brave has done it again! FLAGGED AGAIN!
They have said VPN alone isn’t enough to get you flagged. It’s extra behavior and time on top of that which leads to it. Again, they are cautious on how much to say on that because they don’t want people to say things like, “Oh, I can connect to this country for ## hours and earn higher Rewards without getting flagged, now I’ll do that!” (there are more moving parts than that)
Not sure where it stands now, but it used to be that jailbreaking or rooted devices would be unable to earn. Just as you would not be able to earn or could be flagged if you were attempting to use from a virtual machine or emulator.
I’ll just repeat again, same as you’re repeating it, you don’t get banned/suspended/flagged for VPN alone. Especially if we’re speaking for casual use. Though not precise, one of the things hinted before though was people using it to attempt Rewards from outside of the country. They live in a country with very few ad campaigns. They have Brave open 16 hours a day, of which 14 hours are in United States. They do hardly anything, so it’s not like they are using it for streaming on YouTube, Netflix, etc. It’s just them opening new tabs or doing random searches. These types of behaviors start combining to say that it’s being done to abuse Rewards and attempt higher earnings.
Oh, they do. The system has been improving. It used to be you could just change your IP and automatically get ads from that country. It’s been improved on a bit where it tries to verify deeper and if they see you’re actually not from that country, then it doesn’t let you earn BAT. They keep tweaking things and have been debating on various methods, such as only allowing people to see ads from their verified country regardless what their IP address might be.
Yes, even brave doesn’t flag if you just used VPN. Clarified by Project manager of Brave rewards, Chriscat. He said that in a call
Thanks for this update. I was one who was flagged and got reinstated. My tablet still won’t connect, but I think it’s probably the tablet itself. Happy to hear that they’re addressing the situation.
I just wanted to thank the support team for addressing my ticket and countless others, as I’m sure this is a very time consuming somewhat monotonous process.
I wanted to know bevause my account got flagged and cause of that ive not received two months worth of BAT, somewhere around 10+ at least., what would cause an account to be flagged? Because i pretty much just use brave browser like normal with a vpn and only a few extensions (pw manager). I havent been on here in a while and im heavily medicated right now with a cocktail of thing’s cause of my epilepsy acting up so my brain and memory isnt 100%. Is a ticket the same as opening a topic (i think provably not but then again im half a zombie atm so)and where do this.
the link below will get you there
Greatly appreciated for the assistance. This is how brain dead i am. Upon reaching the subject component my brain went blank as to what the problem was called… oh yeah flagged nevermind it came back to me.
Still having this issue since May. I realize that a lot of people were affected but I wanted to put my support ticket here to show that I’m trying 
Support Ticket #: 211931
This is the first topic I responded to about this issue since I didn’t want to flood the forums with tons of topics about the same thing:
Let me ask, when did you create the support ticket? Did you do it back around June 19 or is it only fairly recent?
