Payout & Escrow Terms

1. Overview

These Payout & Escrow Terms describe how money moves through the Platform and supplement the main Terms of Service. Where this document and the main Terms of Service disagree, the main Terms of Service take precedence for contract formation and dispute-handling, and this document takes precedence for the mechanics of custody and payout.

The Platform uses a three-party escrow arrangement operated by TradeSafe Escrow (Pty) Ltd (TradeSafe), a registered South African digital-escrow service:

• The brand that posts and funds a bounty is the BUYER.
• The hunter who claims the bounty, submits compliant proof, and receives a payout is the SELLER.
• Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd acts as AGENT on the transaction — after validation is complete and the brand explicitly approves the submission, we instruct automatic TradeSafe release from escrow and are paid our fees through the same mechanism.
• TradeSafe is the escrow — it holds the funds from deposit to release in its regulated escrow account.

Social Bounty does not receive, hold, or re-transmit bounty funds in its own bank account at any point. The funds sit in TradeSafe's escrow from deposit to release.

2. Not banking, not lending, not investment

The service described in these Terms is a commercial escrow on a per-bounty basis. It is not any of the following, and nothing on the Platform should be read as offering any of the following:

• It is not a deposit-taking service. Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd is not a bank, is not registered as such under the Banks Act 94 of 1990, and does not hold balances on your behalf. You cannot deposit funds with us and cannot withdraw a "wallet balance" on demand — there is no wallet.
• It is not a credit or lending service. No credit is extended by us to any participant. Nothing in these Terms constitutes a "credit agreement" for the purposes of the National Credit Act 34 of 2005 (NCA).
• It is not a financial-advice or intermediary service. We do not give financial advice and we do not act as an intermediary in a financial product for purposes of the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act 37 of 2002 (FAIS). The Platform does not offer investment, savings, or yield features.
• It is not an investment scheme. Funding a bounty is payment for a specific promotional deliverable; it is not the purchase of a security and carries no expectation of return beyond the content described in the brief.

TradeSafe's own regulatory status as a digital-escrow service is set out on its website. Our arrangement with TradeSafe does not extend its licences or registrations to Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd.

3. How funds move

The end-to-end flow for a single bounty is:

1. The brand creates a bounty, enters a face-value reward, and is quoted a total charge that includes the brand admin fee, transaction fee, and global platform fee (see clause 5).
2. The brand pays the total charge via TradeSafe's hosted checkout. TradeSafe captures the payment and records it against the bounty's escrow transaction.
3. TradeSafe holds the funds in escrow. Social Bounty receives confirmation of the deposit and flips the bounty to live; the bounty can now accept submissions.
4. Hunters claim the bounty, submit proof, and (where the brief has checkable rules) their submissions are automatically verified.
5. After validation is complete, the brand explicitly approves a submission in the brand review tool. Social Bounty (as AGENT) then calls TradeSafe's allocationAcceptDelivery instruction through the automatic payout process.
6. TradeSafe releases the hunter's net payout from escrow to the hunter's registered South African bank account, deducts the platform fees and pays them to Social Bounty, and marks the allocation as settled.
7. Social Bounty records the release in its internal double-entry ledger and writes an audit-log entry for the transaction.

4. Payment methods

Inbound payments are captured through TradeSafe's hosted checkout. TradeSafe controls the payment methods available to each payer at checkout, which may include card, bank-transfer, mobile-presentment, instalment, or manual-deposit options where TradeSafe enables them.

• Card payments presented by TradeSafe checkout
• Bank-transfer options presented by TradeSafe checkout
• Mobile-presentment options presented by TradeSafe checkout
• Instalment options presented by TradeSafe checkout
• Manual-deposit references presented by TradeSafe checkout

The exact list available at checkout is controlled by TradeSafe and may change without notice. Foreign-issued cards may be declined by the issuing bank for South African merchants; that is a matter between you and your issuer.

Outbound payouts to hunters are made by EFT to a South African bank account registered on the hunter's TradeSafe SELLER token. We do not currently support payouts to mobile-money wallets, foreign bank accounts, or crypto wallets.

5. Fees recap

Fees deducted from each bounty comprise:

• a 20% hunter commission (Free plan), deducted from the reward before the hunter is paid;
• a 15% brand admin fee (Free plan), added to the brand's checkout total;
• a 5% transaction fee, added to the brand's checkout total;
• a 3.5% global platform fee, charged separately on each side of the transaction.

Banking or payment-method charges imposed by TradeSafe or the paying bank are passed through at cost and disclosed at checkout. Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd is not currently VAT-registered (our turnover is below the R1 million compulsory-registration threshold under the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991), so no VAT is charged on our fees. The full numeric example is in clause 8 of the Terms of Service.

6. Clearance & settlement

The time between completed validation, explicit brand approval, automatic TradeSafe release instruction, and funds landing in the hunter's bank account has two components:

• Platform clearance — a hold we apply on the hunter's side, set by the hunter's plan, to absorb reversal-within-window scenarios (see clause 7). Current plan terms are published on the Platform and recorded on each transaction at the moment of approval. The plan in force at that moment is the one that applies, even if the hunter's plan changes later.
• TradeSafe settlement — the time TradeSafe takes to move the funds from its escrow account to the hunter's bank. TradeSafe's own service-level commitments apply; in typical operation this is same-business-day after the release instruction. TradeSafe's settlement timings are controlled by TradeSafe and are not guaranteed by Social Bounty.

Automatic payout releases scheduled on weekends or public holidays may settle on the next business day. If your bank has its own inbound-deposit hold, the funds may be visible but not yet cleared in your account for a further period — that is a matter between you and your bank.

7. Refunds & reversals

A bounty-funded payment may be refunded or reversed in the following scenarios. In each case we write an audit-log entry and (where you are affected) notify you by email with a short reason.

7.1 Submission rejected before approval

If a brand rejects every submission to a bounty, or cancels the bounty before any submission is approved, the escrowed funds (less non-recoverable payment-method fees levied by TradeSafe or the paying bank) are refunded to the brand's originating payment method. Refunds follow TradeSafe's refund channel for the original payment method and typically take two to seven business days to appear.

7.2 Post removal in breach of a visibility requirement

Where a bounty brief requires the hunter's post to remain publicly accessible for a set duration (a fixed maximum of up to 90 days), our scheduler re-checks the post on a regular cadence. If two consecutive re-checks at least six hours apart both find the post unreachable, and the failures are not attributable to a known third-party outage, we treat the post as removed. The consequence depends on whether the payout has already been released.

Before payout. If the removal is detected while the funds are still in escrow during the clearance period, we automatically reverse the escrow allocation back to the brand by posting a compensating ledger entry. No money has reached the hunter, so the brand is made whole for that submission.

After payout — released funds cannot be reversed. Once a payout has been released to a hunter's bank account, the EFT is final and cannot be reversed, and there is no hunter wallet for us to debit. If a hunter removes the post in breach of the visibility requirement after the payout has been released, the hunter becomes liable to Social Bounty for the net amount they were paid for that submission. We will ask the hunter to restore the post within 7 days, withhold and set off the hunter's future bounty earnings toward the amount owed, and suspend or permanently close the account if the hunter does not comply. This obligation is a restitution of value the hunter agreed to deliver and then withdrew — not a penalty — and it is governed by clause 12 of the Terms of Service.

Important for brands. A brand is reimbursed only to the extent that Social Bounty actually recovers funds from the hunter. The maximum amount we can recover from a hunter and reimburse to you is the net sum that hunter received — which is less than the total you paid for the bounty, because platform fees (the brand admin fee, transaction fee, hunter commission, and the global platform fee) are earned at the moment of payout and cannot be reversed. We do not guarantee that recovery will succeed, and we do not fund any shortfall from our own resources. If a hunter never earns again on the Platform, recovery by set-off may not be possible at all. There is no automatic, unconditional post-payout refund.

We notify both brand and hunter by email before and at the point of any reversal or when a liability is opened. A hunter who believes a removal finding was a false positive (for example the post is live but geo-blocked to the scraper, or the host platform removed it) may appeal through our complaints process; where the appeal is upheld we reinstate the payout or cancel the liability and reverse any set-off already applied.

7.3 Dispute decided in the brand's favour

Where a formal dispute is decided in the brand's favour following review, the escrow release for that submission may be reversed by compensating entry and the funds returned to the brand.

7.4 Financial Kill Switch

During a suspected financial-integrity incident a super-admin may activate the Platform's Financial Kill Switch, which halts new payouts and new ledger postings while the underlying cause is investigated. Pending instructions to TradeSafe are held in the queue rather than cancelled. Once the incident is resolved, the queue is released. The Kill Switch is a last-resort control and is fully audit-logged.

7.5 Super-admin correction

Where a ledger error is identified that cannot be fixed by ordinary flows, a super-admin may post a balanced compensating entry to correct the error. Compensating entries require a typed confirmation and a written reason, and a full audit-log row is written with the actor identity and the correction rationale. They are reviewed post-hoc through our Finance dashboards.

8. TradeSafe's own terms

TradeSafe Escrow (Pty) Ltd has its own service terms, privacy notice, and fee schedule that apply in addition to these Terms. Your use of TradeSafe (as BUYER to fund a bounty, as SELLER to receive a payout) is governed by those TradeSafe terms, which you will be asked to accept when you first interact with the TradeSafe hosted checkout or beneficiary-capture flow.

You can read TradeSafe's service terms, privacy notice, and fee schedule at tradesafe.co.za. Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd is not responsible for TradeSafe's own policies, but we choose our escrow partner with care and we will tell you if we change it.

9. Outages & retries

If TradeSafe is unreachable when a brand tries to fund a bounty or when we try to release a payout, the relevant instruction is held in the queue and retried on an exponential backoff. Brands will see a clear error and can retry; hunters will see the payout as "release initiated — waiting for escrow partner" until TradeSafe confirms.

For release instructions, our system is idempotent: a retried instruction will not cause a double release. The TradeSafe webhook replay protections and our own double-entry ledger prevent duplicate postings even if multiple retries reach TradeSafe.

If an outage lasts more than 24 hours for any single instruction, we will proactively email the affected user with a short update and an ETA where we have one.

10. Tax

Hunters are responsible for their own income tax. Payouts to a hunter are payments for services rendered; they are not employment income and we do not withhold PAYE or UIF. If you are unsure of your tax position, speak to a SARS-registered tax practitioner.

We may be required to report aggregated payout information to the South African Revenue Service under the Tax Administration Act 28 of 2011. Where we do so, we act as required by law and in line with the disclosure commitments in our Privacy Policy.

VAT. Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd is not currently VAT-registered under the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991, as our taxable supplies are below the R1 million compulsory-registration threshold. No VAT is charged on our fees and no VAT invoices are issued. If our turnover reaches the threshold we will register, display our VAT number on the Platform, and give at least 30 days' notice before adding VAT to any fee.

Record retention. We retain financial records for at least five years from the date of the transaction, in line with section 29 of the Tax Administration Act, and for longer where another law requires it. Deleting your account does not delete financial records within that window.

11. Contact

For questions about payouts, escrow, or any item in this document, email us at legal@socialbounty.cash. To raise a formal complaint, use our Complaints & Dispute Resolution process.