Trust and safety
Onflow Ads is a marketplace. Real money and real audiences move between people who have usually never met, often across countries, usually without a contract. This page explains the system that makes that safe, and points you to the page that covers each part of it in full.
The problem this system solves
Every placement on Onflow Ads has the same shape: one side pays first, the other side delivers afterwards. That gap is where every marketplace fraud lives — the post that never goes up, the post that quietly comes down, the buyer who takes the delivery and then claims it never happened.
Four things close that gap:
- Money is held, not handed over. Payment sits in escrow until the placement runs as agreed.
- Delivery is verified, not asserted. An automated monitor checks the post is live and stays live, and the result is archived as proof.
- Conduct is scored and published. Every account carries one reliability number, moved only by confirmed outcomes and written to a ledger you can read.
- Disputes end with a person. Automated systems can pause money and apply published penalties; only a human resolves a concern, and every penalty can be appealed.
Good-faith users should never be worse off for a problem that wasn't their fault, and bad-faith users should find abuse expensive.
The four parts, and where each lives
| Part | What it does | Read the full page |
|---|---|---|
| The reliability score | The single 0-to-10 number every account carries, what moves it, what it unlocks and locks, and how to recover a drop | Your reliability score |
| Account standing | The distinct states your account can be in — Under Review, below a floor, suspended, banned — what each blocks, and how each ends | Account standing |
| Fraud and bot protection | The automated checks you can see: the delivery monitor, anti-cheat, payment verification, anti-abuse rules, rate limits, automated-access blocking | Fraud and bot protection |
| Appeals and concerns | The two things you can do: contest a penalty on your record, and report a deal that went wrong | Appeals and fraud concerns |
The rest of this page covers the pieces that belong to a deal itself rather than to an account: escrow, proof and moderation.
How a paid placement is protected, step by step
This is what happens around your money on a single paid placement, from booking to payout.
- You book and pay. The charge leaves your wallet and is held in escrow. The owner does not have it yet.
- The owner accepts. On higher-value bookings the owner also stakes a refundable good-faith deposit — their own money, returned on clean delivery and forfeited to you if they cause the failure. It is the only mechanism that makes ghosting an accepted job cost an owner something immediately, rather than only costing them score.
- The post goes live. The delivery link is recorded and the creative is frozen into a proof archive — the exact artefact a dispute would be argued over.
- The monitor watches it for the purchased window: still posted, and still pinned where the format promised hours on top. See Fraud and bot protection.
- The window ends. If everything ran clean, the payout releases to the owner, both sides earn reliability credit, and you can leave a verified review.
- If something went wrong, one of three things happens instead: the monitor flags it and holds the payout automatically; your plan's Verified Delivery Insurance refunds you without a dispute; or you raise a fraud concern and a person resolves it.
When the payout actually releases
The release rule is a plan benefit, not a fixed platform rule — higher plans release sooner, and the fastest rungs release on the first successful delivery check rather than after the full run. The exact rule for each tier is in Comparing the tiers. Two things are true on every plan:
- You can always release it early yourself by confirming the placement from your orders page, once you have checked the post is live and correct.
- A flag or an open concern always beats the clock. A flagged order or one with an open fraud concern does not auto-release, regardless of plan.
The confirm action on your orders page pays the owner straight away and cannot be undone from the interface. Check the post is live, in the right channel, and unaltered before you confirm. If it is not, raise a concern instead.
Cancelling before it runs
Cancelling is not a dispute, and it is the right tool when nothing has gone wrong yet — you simply changed your mind or your plans moved.
| When you cancel | What happens |
|---|---|
| Before the owner accepts | Withdrawn and refunded in full to your wallet, with no fee and no reliability effect |
| After the owner accepted, before it goes live | A late-cancellation fee is deducted and paid to the owner as compensation for the slot they committed and turned other bookings away for; the rest is refunded. The owner's good-faith deposit is returned — they did nothing wrong. You also take an "Abandoned a deal you started" reliability penalty, which doubles for a repeat pattern |
| Once it is live | Refused: "This ad is already live — it can no longer be cancelled." A placement that has run cannot be un-spent |
The Cancel booking button on your orders page names the fee percentage, and arming it shows the exact refund and fee in the confirm label before anything is committed. Full detail: Refund Policy.
Delivery proof
Proof is what turns "he said, she said" into a decision.
- Every delivered placement is archived. The agreed creative and the delivered link are frozen at delivery, and proof captures are timestamped. This archive is what an Onflow Ads reviewer arbitrates on — not the two parties' prose.
- You can open the archive yourself from the Delivery proof panel on the order in your orders page.
- Third parties can verify a placement without an account. Public placement-proof pages let a client or partner confirm that a placement really ran, with no sign-in.
- Higher plans add signed Placement Proof Certificates — see Comparing the tiers.
- When a concern is raised, the evidence is frozen at that moment: what the monitor measured, the delivery figures, and the proof-capture trail. Neither party can change the record after the fact.
Moderation
- Channels are reviewed before they join the network. A submitted or edited channel sits at Pending, shows Under review on its own page, and goes live only once approved. If the reviewer asks for changes the status reads Needs changes with their note attached, and you can edit and resubmit. Walkthrough: Verify your channel.
- Campaigns and creatives may be reviewed against the acceptable-use rules.
- AI-assisted content is your responsibility. Copy the AI happily wrote can still breach platform rules — you approve everything published from your channel. See Content rules for AI.
Serious abuse — beyond the score
The reliability system handles ordinary friction between honest people. Deliberate abuse is a different category.
For deliberate fraud, scams, chargeback abuse, coordinated manipulation, or anything that harms other members, Onflow Ads reserves the right — at its sole discretion — to:
- Freeze payouts and the account permanently — every balance held, nothing released
- Delete the account and all of its data in full — with no payout, no refund and no recovery
- Pursue legal action in extreme cases
A below-baseline reliability record does not vanish with the account. Deleting and re-registering with the same identity resumes at that record's floor rather than a fresh 8.0, for a period tied to how serious the mark was. An account in good standing leaves nothing behind at all.
Deliver what you promise, keep it up for the agreed time, and don't defraud anyone — and you will never encounter any of these measures. They exist solely for people who set out to abuse the platform and the members on it.
Reporting a problem
| Problem | Where to go |
|---|---|
| A paid deal went wrong | Raise a fraud concern — Appeals and fraud concerns |
| A penalty on your record looks wrong | Appeal it from Your ledger — same page |
| Your account is blocked or paused and you don't know why | Account standing |
| An unauthorised charge, or a suspected account compromise | Email support@onflowads.com immediately |
| A privacy or data-rights question | Email privacy@onflowads.com |
| Anything else | onflowads.com/contact or @OnflowAdsBot on Telegram |
Next: Fraud and bot protection goes one level down, into the automated checks behind all of this — what the delivery monitor can and cannot conclude, and the exact messages each check produces.