A listing carries two independent signals, and it matters that you read them separately:
A mediator can be fully verified and still pay badly. A mediator with a good record can be completely unverified — most listings are, because most were created by an influencer rather than by the mediator themselves, and nothing about the mediator can be checked until they claim the listing.
Four rungs. Each one names what was actually checked, and each answers a question you might reasonably ask before handing over your own money. There is deliberately no rung for "we audited their bank records against what influencers declared" — that check is not performed, so there is no badge that could claim it.
Nothing has been checked. This is the floor, and it is the permanent state of every listing nobody has claimed. It is not an accusation and it does not mean anything is wrong. It means exactly what it says: nobody at TrustDrive has confirmed anything about this mediator.
If they stop replying, is there a real named person on file, and is the number the campaigns come from actually theirs?
The listing has been claimed; a one-time code was confirmed on the WhatsApp number campaigns are actually sent from, not a secondary line; a government ID or business PAN was uploaded; and a person at TrustDrive checked that the document matches the name on the listing and has not been altered. Valid for 730 days.
What it does not prove: nothing about whether they pay, and nothing about their briefs.
Is there a traceable entity and a traceable money channel — so if they do not reimburse me, there is something to name in a complaint?
Identity verification still valid, plus business documents — a company or GST registration, or a PAN and bank proof for a sole operator — read and checked by a person against the name and address on the listing. We read the documents; we do not query a government registry, and we do not confirm that money actually moves through any account named on them. Valid for 365 days.
What it does not prove: still nothing about whether they pay, and nothing about whether their briefs put your account at risk.
Will working with them put my own marketplace or social account at risk?
Business verification still valid, plus a written policy describing how they instruct influencers to disclose paid relationships, plus a sample of actual campaign briefs they sent to influencers and of deliverables that were actually published, read for whether the disclosure was really there and for the account-risk practices listed in the listing policy. Their stated compliance position must already be a compliant one — the audit checks whether the claim holds, so it is a precondition rather than an outcome. Valid for 270 days — the shortest window on the ladder, because cash-flow practices change faster than a business's identity or registration does.
It is revoked immediately if a brief is substantiated as instructing non-disclosure or requiring an account-risk practice.
Not in force yet. Both halves of that last rule. Identity verification is what will gate recruiting status and recruiting placement, and the compliance audit is what will gate any surface promoting marketplace-review work. Neither gate is wired to a tier yet, so read the tier badges on a listing rather than assuming a placement implies one.
This is the number on the listing that says something like "reimbursed 94% in full across 212 settled campaigns reported by 130 influencers". If you are a mediator disputing your own figure, this section is how to reproduce it from your own ledger.
A campaign is in the calculation if both of these are true:
Over that set, two things are counted:
The published rate is the lower of the two. Not the average of them — the lower one. Here is why that matters. A mediator who reimbursed 190 of 200 campaigns has a 95% rate by count. If the ten they did not pay were the ten largest orders, the rate by value might be 61% — and 61% is what you actually stand to lose. Taking the lower number means a large failure cannot be diluted by a hundred small successes. Read the other way, a mediator who short-pays many small orders while settling the big ones is caught by the count instead. Averaging the two would cancel out exactly the signal each one contributes.
Nothing is smoothed, weighted, or adjusted. There is no prior, no recency curve and no hidden coefficient. A rate a mediator cannot recompute from their own records is a rate they cannot argue with, and that would forfeit the one advantage this number has over an invented "trust score".
There is no overall trust score on this site. A single blended number would hide the thing that actually distinguishes two mediators with identical payment records: one runs ₹400 phone-case campaigns and one runs ₹18,000 smartphone campaigns, and those are completely different risks to you. So the exposure figures sit beside the payment figures, and neither is folded into the other.
Below 5 settled campaigns from at least 3 different influencers, there is no rate. Not a zero, not a provisional figure — the listing says there is not enough data yet.
A zero would state a measurement nobody took, and it would rank a brand new honest listing below a mediator with a genuinely bad record. The second half of the floor — different influencers, not just different campaigns — exists because anybody can create a listing about anybody here. Counting campaigns alone would let one person with a few accounts manufacture a reimbursement rate for a mediator they have never met.
At launch, most of the directory will have no rate. That is the truth, so that is what it says.
They are measured on different clocks and they answer different questions:
Both are medians, not averages, so one extreme case does not distort them.
Against the mediator's own stated payment window, not against a schedule we invented. A mediator who publishes "45 days" is not overdue on day 30. Only where a mediator has stated nothing do we apply a default of 30 days, and there is a 3-day grace period on top before anything is counted as overdue, so a long weekend does not flip a listing's signal.
Stating a very long window buys a mediator no position in the directory. It only puts the stated window on the page next to the observed median, where you can compare them.
Related: what a non-payment flag means, the review policy, and the listing policy. Any change to how these numbers are calculated is published in the policy changelog.