My very terrible experience with Brave Reward

#1

I think Brave Reward is likely a fraud, but I don’t have any evidence now.
Once I have one, I will do my best to stop people from using Brave.

In May this year, I learnt about Brave browser. Using Brave with some additional plug-ins, I am able to get rid of virtually any ad when surfing web. I liked Brave then.
Few weeks later, I learnt that Brave sends out rewards, that’s when the terrible experience begins.
I accumulated a decent amount of BAT and claimed it in the very next month. It went to my browser wallet. In order to withdraw that balance, I registered an Uphold account. It takes about 2 months to verify Uphold account. They say my ID is not qualified and I have to send documents to them back and forth.
When the account is finally verified, Brave stops sending ads to my computer. I can only receive rewards when I can not cash it. Once Brave detected that I am able to cash the reward, they stops sending me any ads thus no reward. So the reward is completely an imagination that can not be turned into reality. Or maybe just because I had bad luck. So I contacted the support team for help. They did not answer me, instead, they disabled my BAT forum account. So I created a new one.
That’s fine. Though I couldn’t earn any more BAT, I could cash the BAT already existed in my wallet. Just when I wanted to do that, I found out that they set a new rule that 25 BAT is required to ‘verify’ the wallet. It is not a rule that existed when I first learnt about Brave Reward. They changed the rule just because I want to withdraw it. Every time I want to withdraw my money from Brave browser, something will change to prevent me from doing it. I contacted the support team again. This time there was a response, saying that 25 BAT is required to join the BAT ecosystem. Those who don’t have enough balance are excluded from the whole BAT project. I can not deposit or withdraw or do anything to my wallet since I don’t have 25 BAT. I couldn’t even tip a verified author because my account is not verified. I used to tip Wikipedia using the rewards I earned from viewing ads, but not any more. I feel like Brave project is about to close. At least, it is a good idea but poorly executed.
Few weeks later, I found out that the warning is a bug. The 25 BAT limitation doesn’t even exist. The rewards already went to my Uphold account. Well, that’s good! Let me withdraw it to ripple network. Guess what happened? Transaction failed. I contacted the Uphold support team for help, they responded by deleting my Uphold account. They say they will refund the balance to me, in August, but they are yet to do so.
I contacted Uphold team again. No response. So I contacted the Financial Ombudsman Service to deal with the company. Uphold finally responded to my request, saying they will refund in the unforeseeable future, probably several years later.
Since Uphold is disconnected from my Brave browser, I can receive Brave ads once more, but probably I can never cash it. I thought the reward would accumulate in my wallet because the browser detected that I can’t cash it. But I didn’t. My reward ‘zeroes’ before the date of reward payout. Not just once. This has been happening for consecutively 2 months. I haven’t be able to claim my rewards for 2 months.
I have always been skeptical about Brave. Sometimes I commented my skeptical view in the forum. Most of them are either deleted or hidden by community members. Maybe this post will be deleted soon. Who knows?

These events maybe just coincidence, but more likely Brave Reward and Uphold are both fraud. They claimed that they respect the users’ privacy, but actually sell our data. They profit from the users, say to users that “I will give you some money some day” but never fulfill the promise.

I think Brave Reward is likely a fraud, but I don’t have any evidence now.
Once I have one, I will do my best to stop people from using Brave.

3 Likes
#2

Hi BruceChen,
I hope you will let us all know when you find your evidence that Brave is a fraud, especially the bit that they sell our browsing data. That is the first time I have heard that said.
My wife and I have had no trouble transferring BAT from Laptops to UpHold Account to Exodus Wallet, every month like clock work. Up until the transaction fees went crazy and UpHold has started charging the transaction fee. Now we just leave it in the UpHold Account until such time as we need it moved.
Would prefer if we could BAT straight to our Exodus, I understand that they have or are going to add Gemini as another option.
I have found most projects have terrible support if you email them as they suggest. I think it is a age thing, young people just never check their emails. Try Twitter or one of the other ones

1 Like
#4

Are you white?
Are you American?
Maybe this is not fraud but just has something to do with racism.

#5

Update:
Brave reward used to work without Uphold.
Three months ago, rewards could be stored temporally in the browser wallet and used to tip creators.
But now, the policy changed. An Uphold account is required. They change the policy over and over again just to prevent me from joining the Brave ecosystem.
Also, my account in Brave forum is disabled.
This is racism.

#6

You started out by accusing Brave of Fraud now it is Racism.

No I am NZer living in Perth, Western Australia, with a good tan from going to the beach and gardening.

You will find it is probably just a business decision by Brave, not racism. An example of this was Brave breaking the world into 5 regions and paying the referral rewards at different amounts depending on where the download took place. Plus the amount of ads seen was dependant on your region you were in. Region 5 often only had 1-2 active ad campaigns, hence you would get few ad notifications. This can be viewed at https://brave.com/transparency/ . There was a lot of negative reaction on this forum from people who happen to reside in Region 4 and 5 countries. They felt hard done by. All sorts of accusations were flying around, but no-one tried playing the racism card. A few called Brave a scam. It was one of the reasons I don’t frequent this forum very often unless I am looking for inspiration for my latest blog.

#7

You have a good tan, so you are white.

No one called Binance, Kucoin, Gmail, or Discord a scam.
If some people called Brave a scam, even in BAT forum, it has a lot of room for improvement.

#8

Now you are sounding like a racist, as I don’t see what the country I live in or the colour of my skin has to do with any thing. Lets just stick to the facts.

Binance has been called a lot of things, but maybe not on the BAT forum.
" A couple of hours ago, the Binance CEO CZ, Changpeng Zhao, was alleged of colluding with the CEO of Tron Justin Sun to orchestrate the takeover of Steem blockchain.
This allegation has got several crypto community members talking, while those who are directly affected by the scenario publicly displayed their discontentment." CZ admits he accidently got involved in Steem fiasco. “Room for improvement” would be understatement.

“On 25 September, an unknown hacker exploited the vulnerability of the Asia-based cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin and drained its hot wallets of $281 million in cryptocurrency assets. The episode has become the third-largest theft in the history of cryptocurrency trading platforms.” Obviously Kucoin "has a lot of room for improvement"

Makes Brave Browser look squeaky clean by comparison.

#9

I did an incredible job sharing the link and just when it touches the payment they tell me that my account is under review without any explanation, my YouTube channel is active and has enough views, now each line is downloaded and how I intervene with the users and what they do with the link, so I understand your frustration very well.

2 Likes
#10

Thanks for sharing. So I am not the only one suffering.

1 Like
#11

so we have gone from Fraud to Racism to plain old “suffering and frustration”.

As you said earlier there is room for improvement on Brave’s part. Customer support is nearly non-existant on most sites, so that is just normal. There are a few exceptions. Piblush0x is one of those. Had a post removed, sent them email and they responded within 20 minutes. While it all can be extremely frustrating that is no reason to make outlandish accusations with no facts to back it up.

#12

No one bothers dealing with my frustration. Even the customer support don’t care about the user experience. So I have to be sensational, making outlandish accusations, just to raise the awareness that many users aren’t gratified, especially users who are not born white.
I plan to share this to other forums if my problems remain unsolved.
While there are no facts to back it up right now, I may find some in the future.
Just like communism ended up being dictatorship, Brave will end up being a garbage.

#13

Try taking a deep breath before you contact customer support. That might help them take you seriously. Making outlandish accusations just makes you sound unhinged, no one is going to take you serious. Except maybe some one else who thinks the same. Then you can have your own little thought bubble on twitter etc

Sorry you have a thing about not being born white, whatever that means to you.

Only time will tell if Brave Browser ends up being garbage,
Now they stopped the referral Program, will be interesting to see if they continue the growth of active users.
Brave Rewards has stagnated according to https://brave.com/transparency/
Only time will tell.

#14

I had been serious until I post this one.
I may send you the records of contact if you are interested. They are very serious.
Since they didn’t work, I tried this strategy.
If this strategy doesn’t work either, I will try a new one, before I extremely hate Brave and create some airdrop or giveaway rewarding people helping me destroy Brave.

1 Like
#15

I have meeting the same issues with BAT during 2020. Can we just be honest and call all this SCAM?
Let’s move to 2021 and just abandoned these fraudsters. Actually I still love Firefox and with support from few plugins it can be even better private browser than Brave.
Adios losers !!! It has been great journey and we learn something at the end.

Ex-Brave user