Which external KYC options do you use and enjoy? I'd be more than happy to take a look and discuss them with our team for consideration.

Regarding lost funds, the only way Brave should ever make an automatic contribution when auto-contribute is disabled is if the contribution were queued up prior to disabling auto-contribute. You can check brave://rewards-internals/ (specifically the Contributions and Event Logs tabs) to compare timestamps to see if a contribution was processed after you disabled auto-contribute. Happy to help claw-back any rewards lost to a bug (if that be the case).

Whatever I can do to improve your experience with Brave; just let me know :)