Block first, report second, explain never

Anyone doing this work for money will eventually get messages that are not about work. The correct response is procedural rather than emotional, and the procedure is short: block, report with the record attached, and do not reply.

The reply is the part that costs you, because a reply is the outcome the behaviour was seeking.

Why the explanation makes it worse

None of this is unusual or specific to this trade. In a 2020 survey of 10,093 US adults, Pew Research Center (2021) found that 41% had personally experienced online harassment, and 25% more severe forms such as physical threats, stalking or sustained harassment.

There is a strong instinct to be professional about it - to explain what you do and do not offer, to be polite, to leave the door open in case this is a real booking.

That instinct is correct for an awkward but genuine buyer and wrong for everything else. Persistent contact of this kind runs on response, and any response is a result. A firm, well-written refusal is a better result than a short one, because it demonstrates that sustained messaging produces sustained attention.

Distinguishing the two cases is easier than it sounds. A real buyer asks about the work and stops when told the answer. The other kind returns after a clear no, changes the subject away from the job, or arrives with no interest in booking anything at all. Handling an uncomfortable request covers the first case, where a single sentence and no explanation is the whole technique.

Once someone has ignored one clear no, treat further messages as traffic rather than as conversation.

The sequence

Screenshot or export the thread first. Blocking on some platforms hides the history from you as well as from them, which is a bad surprise to have after the fact. Capture it before you act.

Block. Not after one more reply, not after a warning that you are about to. Announcing a block is a reply.

Report, once, with the record. Reports resolve on what the reviewer can see, in exactly the way dispute submissions do: a chronology with quoted messages and dates, no characterisation, no adjectives. "On the 3rd I declined and asked them to stop. They sent nine further messages between the 3rd and the 6th" is a report. "This person is harassing me" is a feeling that a queue cannot act on.

Then stop thinking about it. Do not check whether they made a new account. Do not look them up. Investigating is a form of engagement that costs you an evening and achieves nothing.

When it continues

A determined person will return under a new account, and platforms are slower to act on this than anyone would like.

Block the new account with no interaction at all, and report it referencing the earlier case number. The reference is what turns two isolated reports into a pattern in the platform's own records, and pattern is what escalation processes act on.

If it moves off the platform - a message on a personal account, a name they should not have - the subject has changed from nuisance to an information problem. That is the point to review what is linkable to you: a working alias reused elsewhere, an image reverse-searchable, a payment name visible in a transfer. Anonymity as an earner covers how those threads usually get pulled, and the recurring finding is that almost none of it is lost to skilled investigation and nearly all of it to a small reuse.

If contact reaches a threshold that is criminal where you live - threats, attempts to locate you, contact with people around you - that stops being a platform matter. Keep the record, stop responding entirely, and take advice locally, because what constitutes an offence and what the police will act on differ substantially by country.

Reducing the volume before it starts

Some of this is unavoidable and some of it is inbound flow you can shape.

A listing that states the format precisely gets fewer messages from people who were never looking for a service, because there is less ambiguity to hide inside. Screening questions do the same job earlier - the questions that save you an hour are usually written for time-wasting rather than for this, and they filter both.

Separate identity is the structural fix. A working alias, a dedicated email, no reuse of a handle from anywhere personal, and nothing in a profile image that fixes a location.

And keep the platform's own tools in your muscle memory before you need them, rather than reading a help page while upset. Rate Cock's judges page is where the current blocking and reporting routes for that platform are described, and every platform documents its own somewhere similar.

Two notes from outside, both worth having. The norms buyers are given matter more than earners assume: the buyer-side account of how to approach someone doing this work exists partly because most people genuinely do not know, and the well-meaning-but-clumsy category shrinks when they read it. The other is a supply observation - the free tools absorb an enormous share of casual traffic, and what those tools actually do is a fair account of where people who want an answer rather than a person end up. The measurement conventions themselves are neutral ground; the method side is a useful thing to point at when a conversation needs to become technical and impersonal quickly.

None of this is a character test and none of it reflects on your listing. It is a category of inbound traffic that every public-facing trade carries, and the people who find it manageable are the ones who decided the procedure in advance rather than in the moment.