Refuse, report, keep the record

Almost everything a buyer asks for is a scope question with a price attached. A very small number of requests are not, and for those the answer is the same everywhere: refuse, report, preserve the record, and do not reply again.

This post is deliberately short on detail, because the useful part is the sequence rather than a description of the requests.

The categories, named plainly

Four things take a request out of the commercial domain entirely.

Anything involving a minor, in any form, at any remove, however it is framed. There is no ambiguity in any jurisdiction and no context that changes it.

Material the subject has not consented to, including a request to assess images of a person who did not send them. The buyer's ownership of a file is not the subject's consent.

A request that forms part of coercing somebody - producing an assessment to be used against a person, or anything presented as leverage over them.

A request to falsify something a third party will rely on - a document, a verification, an identity.

The first three are the ones that appear in this trade. None of them arrive labelled, and some arrive wrapped in an ordinary-sounding brief, which is why the recognition point is the request itself and never the person's tone.

Two things are worth knowing about how these appear. They are frequently preceded by a normal, paid, unremarkable job, because establishing a working relationship first is the point of that job. And they are often framed as a small variation on something you already offer, so that refusing feels disproportionate. Neither of those should move the answer.

Why there is no conversation to have

The instinct to clarify - to ask what exactly they mean, in case you have misread it - is the wrong instinct here, for three reasons.

A clarifying question reads as a negotiation to the person asking, and the ones who are serious will use it. It also produces a thread in which you appear to be exploring terms, which is the last thing you want in a record somebody else later reads. And it delays the report, which is the only action that actually does anything.

You do not owe an explanation of why you are refusing. The general principle that an unexplained no is stronger than an explained one is true of ordinary awkward requests and much more true here.

The refusal, if you send one at all, is one line and is really for the record rather than for them. "No. I am reporting this." Then nothing else, ever, including if they apologise, explain, or claim it was a test.

The sequence

Preserve first. Capture the thread before you block, because blocking hides the history from you on some platforms - the same trap that catches people dealing with persistent contacts. Do not download or store any material that was sent to you; capture the messages, not the attachments.

Report to the platform, immediately, with the record. Every legitimate platform has an escalation route separate from ordinary disputes, and this is what it exists for. A factual chronology with dates and quoted messages, no adjectives.

Report externally where the category requires it. Which authority, and whether you are obliged rather than merely able, differs by country. For anything involving a minor, the dedicated channels are the obvious ones: in the US, NCMEC's CyberTipline takes reports from the public and from service providers, and says it received more than 36.2 million reports in 2023; in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation accepts anonymous reports. Platforms in this sector generally have reporting obligations of their own and established channels, which is the practical reason to route it through them first rather than instead.

Block, and stop. Do not investigate, do not warn anyone else directly, do not post about it.

Do not delete your record until the platform confirms the matter is closed. That record is the evidence that you refused, which matters if the account is later examined for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

The preparation that makes this manageable

Read the platform's prohibited-conduct rules and its escalation route before you need them, not during. Reading them while distressed is how the report ends up in the wrong queue and sits there for a week - the general argument for reading the rules first applies with more force to the routes you will use once and urgently. For the platform-side version, Rate Cock's judges page is the current description of what a judge account is permitted to accept and where reports go.

Know, too, that reporting is normal and expected rather than dramatic. Platforms in this sector run verification and moderation precisely because these requests exist - what identity verification involves is the visible half of that machinery, and a report from an earner is the other half working as intended.

Two adjacent points are worth having in mind, and both are about consent rather than about crime. Whose material it is and who agreed to it being assessed is the boundary question in every part of this network, and the account of image handling and consent on the tools side is the clearest general statement of it. The retention question sits next to it - what any service stores, and for how long, is why an incident does not simply disappear when a thread is deleted, and the storage and privacy practice documented on the automated side explains the general shape. On the commissioning side, the buyer-facing account of how this work is asked for is written for people acting in good faith, which is nearly everybody, and it is worth remembering that the category described here is a tiny fraction of inbound work.

Withdrawing from a job you have already accepted is the milder version of the same move, and saying no after you said yes covers doing it without losing the review.

Rare does not mean unprepared. The whole value of having read this is that the decision is already made when the message arrives, and the only thing left to do is the sequence.