How Dhwaja decides
Dhwaja answers one question: is this account really the creator it looks like? Here is exactly what each answer means, who made the call, and what to do if we got it wrong about you.
This is really them.
What it takes. Someone at Dhwaja confirmed, by hand, that this creator controls the account, then reviewed the evidence and vouched for it. It is not an identity-document check: no ID is collected. When the subject is an AI character or a brand character rather than a person, the badge means the same review was done on the people who run it — a real, verified person or agency is accountable for the account. It is not a claim that the character is a person. Those profiles say so on the page and on the card.
Who decided. A person at Dhwaja, reviewing evidence. Never a machine, and never the creator themselves.
They showed they control this account. Nobody at Dhwaja has checked who they are.
What it takes. The creator proved they control the account — usually by putting a short code we gave them in their own profile bio, where only the account holder can put it.
Who decided. The proof itself. No human judgement is involved, which is exactly why it says less than Verified: it shows control of an account, not who the person is.
Dhwaja knows this account, but nobody has shown they control it.
What it takes. Dhwaja built the listing from public information before the creator ever arrived, so that a fan checking the account got an answer instead of silence.
Who decided. Nobody yet. This is Dhwaja's own guess, and it is not an accusation — most creators have never heard of us. If it is your account, you can claim it, or tell us it is not yours.
Don't send money. This account was reported for possible impersonator or fraudulent activity.
What it takes. A published warning covers this account: an operator reviewed the evidence, a SECOND operator confirmed it as a separate step, the exact wording came from an approved list, and a cooling-off period passed before it went live.
Who decided. Two different people at Dhwaja, on reviewed evidence, through a process with a deliberate delay in it. The one who writes the accusation is never the one who confirms it. This is the only thing on Dhwaja that accuses anybody, and it is the slowest thing we do on purpose.
Check carefully — nobody has shown this account belongs to the creator it may be taken for.
What it takes. This account is listed under a creator Dhwaja knows, or resembles one, and nobody has proved it belongs to them.
Who decided. A machine signal, not a person — which is why it is amber and not red. It is not a warning and it is not an accusation. It means look more carefully.
Dhwaja has no record of this account. That doesn't make it fake — it means we can't help you here.
What it takes. Nothing. Dhwaja has no record of this account at all.
Who decided. Nobody — there is nothing to decide. This is the most common answer, and it is the one most often misread. It does not mean the account is fake. It means Dhwaja cannot help you with this one.
What Dhwaja never does
Dhwaja handles money in exactly one direction: fans buy Credits, creators get paid out. There is no route back to a fan's bank account. It cannot tell you whether a creator is good to deal with — only whether the account in front of you is really theirs. A green answer is about identity, not about conduct.
When you check an account, the link never leaves your device. Your browser works out which batch of entries to ask for, downloads the whole batch — hundreds of accounts, most of them nothing to do with yours — and does the matching itself. Dhwaja sees which batch you asked for and not which account inside it you cared about.
That is true of the check. It is not true of everything: this page you are reading, and the "is @handle real?" pages a search engine can find, are ordinary web pages with the handle in the address, so those we do see.
If we got it wrong about you
Two different things go wrong, and they have different doors.
Dhwaja listed an account that is not yours. Claim your profile and tell us on the spot — the first screen after you claim shows every account we attached to your name, with a "Not mine" button on each one we found ourselves. A person reviews it. We do not take an account off on one party's say-so, including yours, because the same button pointed at somebody else's account would be a takedown weapon.
You want off Dhwaja entirely. You do not need a reason and nobody will argue with you. If you can prove you control one of the listed accounts, an unclaimed single-account listing comes down automatically, with no human in the loop. Everything else goes to a person. Once a listing is removed we never re-add it from public sources. Your page disappears immediately; the checks fans run catch up at the next rebuild, within about 12 hours.
Somebody is pretending to be you. That is the report path, and reports from the creator being impersonated are prioritized ahead of a stranger's. If your passport is verified, they carry the most weight of any report Dhwaja accepts.
Ask to take a listing down or correct it →
Why the answers are slow to get stronger
Every state above is an entry on an append-only, hash-chained ledger — nothing is edited, only added, and the chain is anchored so that a changed history is detectable. Verification can be taken away again, and that revocability is the only reason it means anything. The one thing Dhwaja will say about a person that accuses them of anything needs two operators, approved wording and a cooling-off period before it is published.
Embeds
The badge a creator copies onto their site shows their live verdict, not a snapshot from when they copied it.
The demand card, shown only for unclaimed creators, shows how many fans have asked for them on Dhwaja.
Never send money because a page said someone is real. Check the account you were contacted from against the accounts on that creator's Dhwaja page, and if they do not match, you are not talking to them.