Reporting someone, and blocking them

FastHands puts two people who have not met into a conversation about work in someone’s home. Nearly all of it is ordinary. When it is not, you should not have to email anyone first — reporting and blocking are built into the app, on the screen where the problem is.

To report: open the ⋮ menu at the top right of a chat, a contractor’s profile, or a job posting. Choose a reason, add detail if you want to, and send.

What you can report

A person, from a chat or from their profile. A job posting, from the job screen. The reasons are a fixed list rather than a blank box, so that reports can be counted and routed instead of read once and forgotten:

• Spam or advertising
• Harassment or abuse
• Asking to take it off FastHands
• Scam or fraud
• Something else

You can add a note in your own words. Whoever reviews the report sees it exactly as you wrote it, together with which conversation or job you were looking at when you sent it.

What happens after you report

The report goes into the queue our team works, alongside content the platform flags on its own. A person reads it.

You will see the same confirmation every time, whatever we end up doing about it. That is deliberate rather than dismissive: if the message changed, the report button would become a way to find out whether a particular person had already been reported. We would rather tell you slightly less than hand anyone that.

What we can do is act on the account. Someone who breaks the rules can be suspended or removed from FastHands, and anything involving a contractor licence can be referred to the CSLB, the state regulator. What we cannot do is move money — we never hold any at any point. The longer version is in our terms.

Blocking someone

Blocking acts on a person, so it is offered where a person is named: in a chat, or on a contractor’s profile. A job posting can be reported but not blocked — there is nobody on a posting to block.

A block takes effect at once and works in both directions. Messages stop, and the conversation leaves your list and theirs. The other person is not notified and sees no error — the thread is simply gone for both of you.

It is reversible, and it is not buried: Profile → Blocked users lists everyone you have blocked, and undoes any of it.

What blocking does not do

Blocking does not cancel a signed agreement. If you have a contract with that person, the contract stands and so does anything owed under it — a block stops the messages and nothing else. The app says so before you confirm.

It also erases nothing. The messages you already exchanged are kept, which is the point of keeping them: that record stays available to you, to whoever reviews a report, and to a court if it ever comes to that.

If someone is in danger

Call 911 first. Report it in the app afterwards, and email us as well so that we know to look straight away rather than in queue order. Serious concerns about licensed work can also go to the CSLB directly; they are the regulator, and a complaint to them carries weight we do not have.

Reaching a person here

Anything you would rather send us directly, including something you do not want to file as a report in the app: support@fasthands.com.