It’s not. People have been making a lot of assumptions and tossing things out on this forum without any knowledge. Just as you’ll often see posts where people post Logs from brave://rewards-internals and try to interpret what it means.
When VPN has been discussed before, it has been made clear that using a VPN needs to match the Locale on your device. So when using VPN, use it to spoof your region IF you want ads. Otherwise for that duration, turn off ads. (they didn’t say that latter part, but I am.). The reason why your Locale and IP needs to match the region has been stated to us, as it’s their legal obligation based on those paying for ads as well as government requirements.
Of course, the biggest issue has been people who are spoofing their location to try to increase the amount of ads they get. I’ve even seen it discussed on Reddit and other places about how people share that they are in regions that ARE NOT supported by ads, but then they want to use a VPN to pretend they are in an ad supported region. That is a blatant attempt to circumnavigate the Terms of Use, which is stated below.
Private ads are only available in certain regions, which we may change from time to time. If you’re not in one of these regions, ads will not be available in Brave Rewards for you. You may not make any attempt to view ads not intended for your region. You’ll only see ads if there are ads in the catalog which match your Brave Rewards profile. For this reason, we don’t guarantee that there will be ads available for you, even if private ads are available in your region.
You’ll notice there it says You may not make any attempt to view ads not intended for your region.
So is VPN what’s causing people to be flagged? That’s kind of a question with double answers. Sure, it’s a contributing factor but what is causing them to be flagged is their attempts to bypass the restrictions they agreed to. Then in perhaps many cases, people just choose not to read and then go spoofing all over the place and ads get frozen when their info doesn’t match, as the system sees it as suspicious behavior. When users contact Brave staff during those periods, staff looks to see if things appear intentional or there are other concerns. If it all pans out, they approve it again but then it still goes back to users needing to do what’s right.