V7 Off-Platform Monetization Policy — Closing the Tebex Gray Economy

Status: V7 policy + enforcement design. Source: fills the planning gap identified in V1_V7_PLAN_SET_AUDIT_2026-06-12.md §6.2 (no policy for off-platform realm monetization). Grounded in V7/V7_features.md (features§"The Economy Firewall and Anti-Fraud", features§"The Creator Economy", features§"Commerce and Rights") and V7/V7_ARCHITECTURE.md (arch§"The Economy Firewall and Anti-Fraud", arch§"The Trust Boundary — Platform vs. Realm"). Owner: Abundantia economy lead (policy + rails), Kuanyin moderation lead (enforcement), Themis (appeals). Date: 2026-06-12.

1. The Problem This Policy Exists For#

FiveM's monetization reality is a gray economy: operators sell cars, weapons, queue priority, admin ranks, and "donator perks" for cash through off-platform webshops (Tebex being the dominant rail), in chronic tension with Rockstar/Take-Two policy that nominally permits only cosmetic/peripheral monetization. The result is the worst of all worlds: pay-to-win norms players resent, revocable-at-any-time operator income, payment-processor risk, zero consumer protection (no refunds, no entitlement guarantees when a server dies), and no platform participation that could fund safety or creators.

V7's economy design already builds the firewall (features§"The Economy Firewall and Anti-Fraud": real-money flows one-directional into entitlements; in-realm play-currency non-cashable). This document supplies the missing piece: the policy and enforcement regime for operators who try to route around the platform rails entirely — selling in-realm advantage for cash on their own website/Discord, exactly as the FiveM gray market does today.

2. Policy — What Is Allowed#

All real-money monetization of a realm runs through platform rails (Abundantia

• Aje). Within that, operators MAY sell:

1. Cosmetics — realm-scoped appearance items, vehicle liveries, housing décor, titles, with no gameplay-stat effect. (The realm's Ixchel balance pass — features§"AI Balance Verification" — is the arbiter of "no gameplay effect" for disputed items.)
2. Queue priority — priority access to a full realm's join queue (features§"Population Targets and Degradation"). Priority never bypasses whitelist review, age gates, or the safety floor.
3. Realm membership/subscription — recurring supporter tiers, whitelist application processing, private-realm access, all delivered as Abundantia subscriptions.
4. Creator content — mods, Collections, assets, per features§"The Creator Economy".
5. Tips/donations — via the platform tip rail (features§"Commerce and Rights"), with no in-realm entitlement attached. A "donation" that reliably yields an in-realm advantage is a sale and is classified by effect, not by label.

Operators MAY also run any play-currency economy they like inside the realm (jobs, casinos under the firewall conditions, player markets) — play-currency is sovereign realm design, provided no real-money bridge exists in either direction (arch§"The Economy Firewall").

3. Policy — What Is Banned#

1. Off-platform sale of any in-realm entitlement — any flow where real money outside Abundantia/Aje yields anything inside a realm: items, vehicles, play-currency, ranks, jobs, whitelist approval, queue priority, unban, or "priority support" that is in fact an entitlement. This is the Tebex pattern and is banned regardless of what is sold — even otherwise-permitted cosmetics become a violation when sold off-rails, because off-rails sales evade refunds, age/spend controls, the safety floor, taxes, and creator dependency-revenue.
2. Sale of in-realm advantage anywhere — stat-bearing items, exclusive weapons/abilities, XP boosts, wipe protection — on or off platform. Platform rails will refuse to list them (the listing classifier + Ixchel balance pass gate), and off-platform sale is a §4 violation.
3. Real-money trade of play-currency in either direction, by operators or players (RMT; arch§"The Economy Firewall and Anti-Fraud" detection applies).
4. Cash-for-moderation — paid unbans, paid immunity, paid admin intervention. This is both a monetization violation and a governance- integrity violation (features§"Whitelisting and Realm Moderation").
5. Gambling with real-money entry or exit — any wager whose stake or prize touches real money or transferable entitlements. (Play-currency casinos with no cash-out remain legal by the firewall design; jurisdiction-specific counsel per features§"The Economy Firewall".)

4. Detection#

Owner: Abundantia anti-fraud team, sharing the graph infrastructure of arch§"The Economy Firewall and Anti-Fraud". Signals, each with a named feed:

1. Realm-config and listing scans — automated scan of realm descriptions, MOTDs, in-realm UI text, and resource string tables for external-store patterns (tebex.io, shopify/sellix-class domains, "donate for VIP", crypto-payment addresses, Discord invite + price-list co-occurrence). Runs at publish and on every realm update (the same ML pre-screen hook as features§"Content Moderation and Minor Protection"). Planning assumption adopted 2026-06-12: pattern corpus seeded from a 500-listing crawl of current FiveM stores; precision target ≥90% before auto-flag routes to enforcement rather than review.
2. Web/Discord presence checks — for Listed/Verified realms, a periodic (weekly) crawl of the realm's declared community links for storefronts selling realm entitlements. Realms declare official links at listing time; undeclared stores discovered via player reports carry the same weight.
3. Economy anomaly detection — ledger queries on the realm's Nephthys economy aggregate (arch§"Nàná — Character and Economy Data Model"):
   • grant-pattern anomalies: rare-item or large-currency grants to accounts within 72h of first join, clustered in time (the "purchased on the webshop, delivered by admin command" fingerprint);
   • admin-grant volume per operator account vs. realm-cohort baseline (flag at >3σ);
   • inventory provenance gaps: high-value item instances created by System-tier grant rather than by any in-realm faucet. Every System-tier ledger mutation is already audit-logged (features§"Capability Gating and Budgets"); these queries are projections over that log.
4. Player reports — a dedicated report category ("paid perks outside the platform") in the standard report flow, routed to Kuanyin with the realm's anomaly dashboard attached. Reporter identity is never revealed to the operator.
5. Cross-signal scoring — signals 1–4 combine into a per-realm off-platform-monetization risk score; score thresholds drive the §5 ladder. Planning assumption adopted 2026-06-12: any single high-confidence signal (e.g., a live storefront page selling realm items) is sufficient for Stage 1 action; economy anomalies alone require human confirmation before any stage beyond warning.

5. Graduated Enforcement Ladder#

All actions are taken by Kuanyin enforcement (human-confirmed at every stage — automation flags, humans act), logged to the realm's compliance record, visible to the operator in the Operator Console, and appealable to Themis (features§"Content Moderation and Minor Protection" appeal path). Timelines are planning assumptions adopted 2026-06-12.

Aggravators that skip stages: sale of moderation outcomes (§3.4), any real-money flow touching minors' accounts, and deliberate evasion (rotating storefront domains after a warning). Player purchasers are not punished; where feasible the platform notifies affected players that off-platform purchases carry no entitlement protection.

6. The Carrot — Making Platform Rails the Better Deal#

Enforcement alone reproduces FiveM's cat-and-mouse. The structural fix is that the legitimate rail must beat Tebex on the operator's own P&L:

• Competitive take rate. Operator storefront sales settle at the committed ≥70% operator/creator share (features§"The Creator Economy") — compared against Tebex's platform fee plus payment processing plus chargeback exposure, and with Aje absorbing KYC/tax/refund mechanics the operator otherwise handles alone.
• Lower friction than a webshop. Entitlements deliver in-client instantly (purchase → entitlement → realm grant via the System-tier entitlement API), no Discord-ticket fulfillment, no admin manually spawning items — which also eliminates the admin-grant fingerprint legitimate operators would otherwise share with violators (§4.3).
• Things Tebex can never offer: engagement-pool income on top of sales; dependency-revenue to the frameworks/assets the realm builds on; refund and chargeback handling; cross-platform (console-certified) delivery (features§"Cross-Platform and Console-Authorized Distribution"); and income that is contractually theirs rather than tolerated-until-revoked.
• Migration amnesty. During the first 90 days after a community migrates (per V7/docs/community-migration.md), pre-existing off-platform supporter arrangements may be wound down without Stage 1 penalty, provided the operator registers the wind-down with Kuanyin and ports supporters to platform subscriptions. Planning assumption adopted 2026-06-12.

7. Effectiveness Metrics#

Reviewed quarterly by Abundantia economy lead + Kuanyin; reported in the platform telemetry suite (features§"Telemetry, Analytics, and Eval Sets"). Targets are planning assumptions adopted 2026-06-12.

If storefront adoption stalls below 40% at month 12, the mandated review is of the rails (fees, fulfillment friction, missing SKU types such as event tickets), not an escalation of enforcement — gray economies are demand signals first.