TrustDrive is a directory of mediators — the people and agencies who recruit influencers into campaigns, brief them, and reimburse them. It is written for the influencer, who orders the product with their own money, produces the deliverable, and is out of pocket until the mediator pays them back.
TrustDrive is not a party to any campaign. It does not arrange, price, brief, or pay for any content, and it never holds anybody's money. What it does is publish who is out there, record what influencers report about being reimbursed, and refuse to list operators whose service depends on the practices below.
Mediators offering any of the following, on the stated condition. The thread running through all of them is the same: the payment is for the work, never for the sentiment, and the relationship is disclosed.
| Service | Condition |
|---|---|
| Disclosed sponsored posts and paid social content | The disclosure is clear, meets the standard that applies where the audience is, and is actually present in the published post — not merely required by the brief. |
| Verified-purchase review programmes of the Amazon Vine kind | Free product for an honest review. The outcome is not guaranteed, requested, or conditioned, and participation is disclosed. |
| Asking real buyers for honest feedback | No payment tied to what the review says or what the rating is. |
| Product seeding | Product sent for genuine use, with the connection disclosed if the recipient posts about it. |
| Buy-and-be-reimbursed arrangements | You buy, you keep the product, you are reimbursed for a genuine deliverable whose content nobody directed. The most common honest arrangement in this market, and the one the reimbursement record measures. |
| Recruitment, campaign management, briefing and reporting | The operational work around a campaign. Not a content-integrity question. |
These are numbered so that an enforcement decision can cite the exact clause it rests on, and so that a mediator told they broke one can tell which one.
| Prohibited practice | |
|---|---|
| P1 | Payment of any kind conditioned on the rating or the sentiment of a review. |
| P2 | Fabricated reviews, or reviews by anyone who has not genuinely bought or used the product. |
| P3 | Instructing, briefing or allowing influencers to leave out the disclosure that they were compensated. |
| P4 | Coordinated brigading, in either direction, including against a competitor. |
| P5 | Buying, renting, farming or selling reviewer or influencer accounts. |
| P6 | Manufacturing verified-purchase status, including buy-and-refund schemes. |
| P7 | Purchased or artificial engagement metrics. |
| P8 | Threatening, paying or pressuring a reviewer to remove or change a genuine review. |
| P9 | Insider reviews presented as independent. |
| P10 | AI-generated reviews or testimonials presented as somebody's real experience. |
| P11 | Misrepresenting TrustDrive verification status, badges or reimbursement record, anywhere. |
| P12 | Manipulating TrustDrive's own reviews, reports, disputes or verification process. |
| P13 | Requiring an influencer, as a condition of a campaign, to do anything that puts their own marketplace account at risk — see the list below. |
| P14 | Withholding reimbursement because a platform removed the deliverable, where the removal was not caused by the influencer ignoring a lawful brief and where the mediator had not said in advance who carries that risk. |
| P15 | Making reimbursement, or continued access to campaigns, conditional on what an influencer writes in a TrustDrive review — including on taking it down. |
| P16 | Threatening an influencer with legal action, or with any other punitive consequence, for having written a review or filed a non-reimbursement report. |
P13, P14, P15 and P16 exist because the harm falls on the influencer rather than on a distant consumer, and a directory written for influencers has to take a position on that. P16 is reportable — see “This mediator threatened an influencer over a review or a non-payment report” on the report form — and, like every compliance report, feeds the same triage and enforcement pipeline the other clauses do.
These are the things a brief can ask for that put your marketplace account at risk, not the mediator's. They are reportable on any listing, and reports of them are shown as counts of what influencers said, never as a conclusion:
The first two, and any requirement to run multiple accounts, are also grounds for enforcement and a hard bar on the Compliance Audited tier.
Stated here because overclaiming is the way a policy like this fails:
Every listing carries a compliance statement. It is a self-declaration by the mediator, shown with the date it was last updated, and it carries no assurance from TrustDrive whatsoever. There are four possible values:
| Value | What the mediator is saying |
|---|---|
| Discloses incentives | They run incentivized work and require, and check, that influencers disclose it. |
| No incentivized content | They do not run incentivized reviews or paid endorsements at all. |
| Not answered | Nobody has answered the question. This is the default on every new listing, including listings created by somebody other than the mediator — which means most of them. It is not a warning and it is not a gap in anyone's cooperation. |
| Declined to state | The mediator was asked and explicitly chose not to answer. |
Only the Compliance Audited tier means anybody at TrustDrive actually checked. See how verification works.
Most listings on TrustDrive were not created by the mediator they describe. An influencer can add a mediator they worked with, and TrustDrive itself can add a listing built only from what the mediator has already published about themselves. Both are labelled on the listing so nobody mistakes one for the other.
The rules around that path are strict, because the subject did not ask to be here:
Anyone can report a listing. Reports go into a queue with a triage deadline, and the stages are:
The mediator is always told what the finding is and which clause it cites, with the appeal route, in wording that stands on its own — for many mediators an enforcement notice is the first contact TrustDrive has ever had with them.
Reports can be filed without signing in. Signed-in reports are weighted higher in the triage queue, ahead of everything but the statutory deadline. An anonymous report backed by nothing else can never suspend or delist a listing on its own — it takes a second report on the same listing, a signed-in report, an upheld non-reimbursement finding, or a compliance-audit failure alongside it before that decision can be made. There is no public count anywhere on the site that a report — anonymous or not — contributes to.
A Grievance Officer and published takedown-response deadlines are required under the IT Rules 2021 — 24 hours to acknowledge, 72 hours to act on the fast-track class of complaint, 15 days otherwise. Both are built: see the Grievance Officer page for the named contact and both statutory clocks.
Stated here rather than left for somebody else to point out. Mediators pay TrustDrive for visibility. Influencers pay nothing. Influencers are also the ones who carry the regulatory exposure and the account risk in every campaign. Those three facts do not sit comfortably together, and there is no framing that makes the tension disappear.
What is done about it:
Publishing a directory of businesses that do something is not the same as providing the machinery through which that thing is arranged, priced and paid for. TrustDrive stays on the first side of that line, which means it will not build:
Every material change is recorded, dated, in the public policy changelog. A policy that can be quietly rewritten is not a policy.
Related: the non-payment report policy, the review policy, and how verification works. Mediators start at For mediators.