Consumer

Complaints & Dispute Resolution

Version 1.3 · Effective 2026-05-28 · Last updated 2026-05-28

If something has gone wrong on Social Bounty, here is how you tell us, what we commit to do about it, and where to go if we have not fixed it to your satisfaction. Using this policy does not take away your right to approach the National Consumer Commission, the Information Regulator or the courts at any point.

Working draft. This document is a first draft intended for internal review. It must be reviewed by an admitted South African attorney before it governs a live user relationship.
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Our commitment

We take complaints seriously. This policy sets out a clear path for raising an issue, a clear commitment on how quickly you will hear back, and a clear route to escalate if our first response does not resolve things. It is written so that you can use it without needing a lawyer.

Social Bounty is operated by Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd (CIPC registration number 2026/301053/07). When this policy says "we" or "us", that is who we mean. When it says "you", we mean any hunter, brand user, visitor or applicant raising a complaint with us.

What this policy covers

This policy covers complaints about:

  • Commercial matters — fees, charges, subscriptions, refunds, bounty funding, payouts, or anything about how money moves.
  • Personal information and privacy — how we collected, used, stored, shared, corrected or deleted your personal information under POPIA.
  • Service quality — the platform not working as described, submissions not verifying correctly, approval delays, broken notifications.
  • Platform conduct — how we have moderated your content, enforced our Acceptable Use Policy, suspended or restricted your account, or otherwise exercised editorial or enforcement discretion.
  • Team conduct — how anyone at Social Bounty has treated you.

This policy does not cover:

  • Criminal matters. If you believe a crime has been committed (fraud, threats, harassment amounting to a criminal offence), report it to the South African Police Service (SAPS) directly. We will assist an SAPS investigation where we lawfully can, but we are not a substitute for one.
  • Disputes between a brand and a hunter that are unrelated to the platform. If you have a private disagreement with another user about something that happened off-platform, that is not ours to adjudicate. If a platform interaction is at the heart of it — a submission, a payout, a bounty rule — then it does fall within this policy and we will look at it.
  • Intellectual-property and copyright takedown notices. Those follow the specific procedure in our IP & Copyright Takedown Policy rather than this one. The outcomes of a takedown decision can still be complained about under this policy if you think we got it wrong.

How to complain

The primary channel for all complaints is email to complaints@socialbounty.cash. If you would prefer to start on a general legal thread, you can also use legal@socialbounty.cash. For data-subject rights (access, correction, deletion under POPIA), use privacy@socialbounty.cash. Where in-app messaging with our support team is available in your account, you can open a case there and we will treat it the same way.

To help us get to the point quickly, please include in your first message:

  • Who you are — the email address on your account, or your username.
  • What happened — a short factual description.
  • When it happened — a date and, if relevant, a time.
  • Any reference numbers you already have — a bounty ID, submission ID, payout ID or support-ticket reference.
  • What you would like us to do to put it right.

That is all. We will not ask you for personal information we do not need to investigate. If we do need something further — for example a screenshot, a URL, or a copy of a receipt — we will ask for it specifically and explain why.

Acknowledgement — within 3 business days

We commit to acknowledging every complaint within 3 business days of receipt. The acknowledgement will include:

  • A case reference number you can quote in any follow-up.
  • A short confirmation of what we understood you to be complaining about — so you can correct us early if we have misunderstood.
  • The name of the person now handling the case.
  • An estimate of when you can expect a substantive response.

If you do not receive an acknowledgement within 3 business days, something has gone wrong on our side. Please nudge us at legal@socialbounty.cash.

Investigation and response

We then investigate. Our response-time commitments are:

  • Commercial, service-quality and platform-conduct complaints: a substantive response, including any proposed resolution, within 14 calendar days of your original message.
  • POPIA data-subject rights requests: up to 30 calendar days, as permitted by section 23(2) of POPIA. In many cases we will be faster, but we will not take longer without telling you in advance and explaining why.

Investigations can be straightforward (check the logs, confirm the outcome, refund the charge) or they can require input from a third party — for example our payments partner, our verification processor or an external regulator. Where that happens we will keep you updated with the case reference at least once every 7 calendar days until the matter is resolved.

Remedies we can offer

What we can put right depends on what went wrong. The range of remedies we can offer includes:

  • Refund. Full or partial reversal of a charge, a subscription fee, or a bounty-budget portion, in line with the rules set out in our Consumer Rights Notice and the ECTA / CPA rights discussed there.
  • Resubmission. For hunters whose submission was rejected because of a verification failure that turned out to be a false positive, we can reopen the submission and let you resubmit the affected URLs without penalty.
  • Account reinstatement or review. If we have suspended or restricted your account and our review shows the action was wrong (or the response was disproportionate), we will reinstate the account and correct any follow-on effects.
  • Correction. Fixing personal-information errors, updating public content we got wrong, or correcting a ledger entry.
  • Apology and explanation. Where we got something wrong but the loss is not financial — for example a communication failure or a usability bug that cost you time — a clear apology and a root-cause explanation is sometimes the fair remedy.
  • Process improvement. For the kind of complaint that reveals a structural problem (a misleading screen, a confusing fee disclosure, a policy that is not working as intended), we will change the underlying practice and tell you what we changed.

If the remedy you asked for is not the one we think is appropriate, we will tell you why and propose an alternative. You do not have to accept our proposal. Accepting or rejecting it does not close off your right to escalate externally.

Internal escalation — if the first response does not resolve the issue

If the response you receive at the support level does not resolve the complaint to your satisfaction, reply to the same email thread and say so. Quote your case reference. The matter will then be escalated within Social Bounty to our Complaints Officer, and — if still unresolved — to a director of the company. We aim to complete an internal escalation within a further 10 business days.

Internal escalation is optional. You can go to an external channel (below) at any point, without using our internal process first.

External escalation — the rights we preserve for you

Whatever the outcome of our internal process, the following external channels remain available to you. We will cooperate with any of them.

National Consumer Commission (consumer complaints)

For complaints about your rights under the Consumer Protection Act — unfair terms, pricing, refunds, service quality, misleading representations — you may approach the National Consumer Commission at https://www.thencc.gov.za. Your right to do this is protected by section 52 of the CPA and cannot be contracted away.

Information Regulator (data-privacy complaints)

For complaints about how we have handled your personal information under POPIA, you may approach the Information Regulator of South Africa at https://inforegulator.org.za, by email to POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za. Our Privacy Policy and Information Officer & Data Subject Rights page set out how to raise a POPIA issue with us directly first, but that step is not a precondition — you can approach the Regulator whenever you choose.

Consumer Goods and Services Ombud

Social Bounty is not currently a participant in the Consumer Goods and Services Ombud (CGSO) scheme. We are reviewing membership and will update this page if that changes. In the meantime, the CGSO is not an available escalation route for complaints about our platform; the NCC is.

Voluntary arbitration

Where both you and we agree in writing, a dispute can be referred to arbitration under the rules of the Arbitration Foundation of Southern Africa (AFSA). This is a voluntary alternative, not a requirement. Agreeing to arbitration does not take away your right to approach the NCC under CPA section 52.

The courts

For matters that fall outside the above channels, the Gauteng Division of the High Court of South Africa has jurisdiction. Depending on the amount in dispute, the Magistrates' Courts and Small Claims Courts may be more accessible and less expensive starting points.

Contesting a post-removal finding

Social Bounty runs an automated post-visibility check on approved hunter content. If a post that was required to stay live appears to have been taken down, what happens next depends on whether the hunter has already been paid. Before payout, the still-escrowed funds can be automatically refunded to the brand. After payout, the released funds cannot be reversed — instead, a hunter who removes a required post becomes liable to repay the net amount they were paid, and a brand's recourse is the recovery we pursue from that hunter (by netting their future earnings), not a guaranteed refund. The full rules are in clause 12 of the Terms of Service. Either way, an automated check can make a mistake (an Apify false positive, a transient social-network outage, a geo-restriction misread as a removal, or a removal by the host platform rather than the hunter).

If you are a hunter who believes a refund or a liability was wrongly raised against you — the post is still live, the URL is reachable, or the platform has otherwise got it wrong — please email complaints@socialbounty.cash with:

  • The submission ID (from your account).
  • The public URL of the post at issue.
  • A recent screenshot showing the post is live, with a visible timestamp.
  • The approximate date and time the refund fired or the liability was opened (we will have this on our side too).

We commit to reviewing a contested post-removal finding within 7 business days of receiving the information above. If the check was wrong, we reverse the refund or cancel the liability, restore the payout, and undo any set-off we had applied against your future earnings. If we agree with the check, we will explain in writing what the verification layer saw, so you understand the reasoning — even if we end up disagreeing with you, you will know why.

This specific subsection does not limit your general rights. If the outcome of our review is not acceptable, the internal and external escalation routes above still apply.

No waiver of your statutory rights

Using this complaints procedure does not waive any right you have under South African law. In particular, section 52 of the Consumer Protection Act preserves your right to approach the National Consumer Commission directly at any time, whether or not you have first used our internal process. If anything in this policy reads as though it takes that away, read it the other way — it does not and it cannot.

If we propose a resolution and you accept it, we may ask you to confirm in writing that the specific complaint is closed. That is about the specific complaint only. It does not bind you on any future issue, and it does not take away your statutory rights going forward.

No retaliation

We do not retaliate against users who raise a complaint in good faith. Filing a complaint — whether with us, the NCC, the Information Regulator or anyone else — will not cause your account to be suspended, your reputation score to be adjusted, your submissions to be deprioritised, or your future bounties to be treated differently.

The only exception, and it is not retaliation: if a complaint itself contains content that breaches our Acceptable Use Policy (harassment, threats, abusive language directed at staff or at other users), we may decline to engage with that specific communication and ask you to resubmit it without the problematic content. The underlying complaint is still investigated.

Contact

Complaints and escalations:

Related reading: Consumer Rights Notice, Privacy Policy, Information Officer & Data Subject Rights, Terms of Service.

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