If a mediator's profile carries a line saying that a non-payment report was upheld on a date, or that TrustDrive contacted the mediator and received no response, this page is what those words mean. Both are statements about a procedure TrustDrive followed. Neither is a statement about anybody's character.
Two things they do not mean:
A report is filed by one influencer, about one campaign they took part in, and it names a specific sum of money. It is not a rating and it is not an opinion. To file one you need:
One report per campaign. A second grievance about the same order updates the existing report rather than creating a second one, so a single dispute cannot be made to look like a pattern.
Not being paid is a negative, and a negative cannot be evidenced directly. What can be evidenced is everything around it, and there are three pieces:
You also state, on the record, that you were not reimbursed. That declaration is kept with the report.
The standard is graded rather than pass-or-fail, because an honest influencer who deleted a chat should not be silenced by a hard floor, and because a bare assertion should never become a public allegation about a named person.
| What you attached | What can happen |
|---|---|
| Two or three of the three | The report can be adjudicated in full. If it is upheld, or if the mediator does not answer, it can appear as a named report on the listing and raise a flag. |
| One, or none | The report is still recorded and you can still publish your own review of the campaign. It counts toward the number of people who have reported waiting. It never becomes a named report against the mediator, and it never raises a flag. |
The line is drawn at a single question: can TrustDrive point to something other than one person's word? Below that line the product records you and does not vouch for you, which is the honest position for it to take about a business that may never have asked to be listed here.
Evidence you upload is private. It is readable by TrustDrive staff only, never published, and never attached to the public page. The usual artifact is a WhatsApp screenshot, which carries phone numbers, a group name, and often an order ID that resolves to somebody's home address.
You do not need an account to answer. The notice we send carries a link that sends a one-time code back to the same contact, and that code is what lets you respond — no sign-up, no claiming the listing, and it keeps working after your response window closes, because a late answer still takes the “did not respond” line off the listing.
Not in force yet. That link is on the email notice and not yet on the WhatsApp one. Where we reached a mediator on WhatsApp, the message tells them a report exists and does not yet hand them the reply link — they can still answer by claiming the listing, which is the harder route and the one this channel exists to replace. Where a mediator cannot be reached at all, no flag is raised.
| Outcome | What it means | What appears publicly |
|---|---|---|
| Upheld | A reviewer read the evidence and the mediator's response and concluded the reimbursement was not made. | A dated line on the listing, and a standing flag. |
| Unanswered | The response window closed with no response. Nobody adjudicated whether the money is owed. | A dated line saying exactly that, and a standing flag. |
| Reimbursed | The mediator paid, whether before or after being notified. | A dated line recording that it was reported and then resolved. No flag. The delay still counts in how long this mediator holds money. |
| Dismissed | The claim did not stand up. | Nothing. |
| Insufficient evidence | There was not enough to decide either way. This is not a finding against either party. | Nothing. |
This is the most important distinction on the page, and TrustDrive is careful never to collapse the two. Upheld means we looked at the evidence and reached a conclusion. Unanswered means we sent a message and heard nothing back — which is something TrustDrive can prove from its own records, and which says nothing at all about whether the money is owed.
| Upheld | Unanswered | |
|---|---|---|
| Shows on the profile and the listing card | Yes | Yes, in its own wording |
| Takes the mediator out of every curated collection | Yes | Yes |
| Moves the mediator down the directory ordering | Yes | No |
| Can remove a verification tier | Yes | No |
The reason Unanswered does not move the ordering is worth stating plainly. On a listing nobody has claimed, the number we contacted is often the number the person filing the report gave us, and TrustDrive has never verified it. Sinking a business beneath every other listing on the site because an unverified number did not reply would be a consequence with no premise underneath it — and it would fall hardest on exactly the people least able to answer.
Not in force yet. An unanswered report is meant to suspend curated placement, and today only an upheld finding does. So a mediator with an open, unanswered report against them can still appear on a curated shelf. There is no paid placement for it to suspend as well — TrustDrive sells nothing — but on the editorial half the rule and the code do not yet agree, and this page says so rather than describing the rule as though it were already running.
Where every contact route on a listing fails, no flag of any kind is raised and the wording "did not respond" is not used. Silence is only meaningful if the message arrived. The report is still recorded and can still be decided on its evidence.
It depends which flag it is, and the difference is the whole design.
An unanswered flag clears the moment the mediator answers, whatever the answer says — reimbursed already, reimbursing next week, disputing the amount, disputing that the campaign happened at all. Nobody decides this and nobody has to approve it, because the thing the flag stated is simply no longer true, and leaving a "did not respond" mark on somebody who has now responded would be a false statement that no amount of process would make true. The report then goes back into the queue and is decided normally; only an upheld finding raises a flag again.
That is deliberately cheap. It costs a mediator nothing but a reply, and the one behaviour that makes everything here harder — ignoring TrustDrive completely — is the one behaviour it takes away the reason for.
An upheld flag is a finding, and a late reply does not unmake it. It clears three ways, all of them recorded decisions:
No flag comes off by the passage of time, none by later good reviews, and never by payment to TrustDrive. There is no price, at any commercial tier, for removing, hiding, delaying or downgrading a report, a flag or a count. That is enforced in the code and not merely promised here.
Clearing is not erasure. A cleared flag stays in the listing's history with its dates — reported on one date, resolved on another. The time the money was held is a fact and it stays one.
Not decided yet. Whether a very old flag, on a listing with a long clean record since, can eventually stop being shown on the card. A draft rule exists — a flag older than 540 days with at least 20 reimbursements settled since — but it has not been decided or built, and no flag has ever aged off. Until it is, flags stand until one of the three routes above clears them.
An unclaimed listing gets the longer window — 14 days rather than 7. A mediator who has claimed their listing chose to be reachable here; one who has not is being contacted at a number or address somebody else supplied and may not check for a while, so the shorter clock would be measuring how fast they notice a message rather than how they answer it.
One TrustDrive reviewer, working from the evidence on file, writing to a record that cannot be edited afterwards: the outcome, the reason, the evidence as it stood, the notification history, who decided, and when. A requirement for a second reviewer to counter-sign the most serious outcomes is built into the product and is switched off, because there is not yet a second reviewer.
Not decided yet. When the second-signature requirement is switched on, and for which outcomes first. The owner has to confirm this before launch.
If you are waiting to be reimbursed, start at Report a non-payment. If you are a mediator who has been notified of a report, For mediators explains how to answer, and how to claim a listing you did not create.
Related: the review policy, the listing policy, and how verification and the reimbursement record work. Every change to this page is recorded in the public policy changelog.