One morning last May, Melody Kush discovered that someone was using her Twitter photos to catfish people into paying for a Snapchat premium account that didn’t even exist. Kush is a sex worker—an erotic model, to be precise—and for someone who does much of her work via social media, that kind of scam isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s an existential threat to her brand. She asked the imitator to stop; they refused, and blocked her. So she screenshotted the person’s snapcode and asked her 114,000-person Twitter following to report the account for her.

The next day, her Twitter account was permanently deleted—right before she was supposed to teach a social media seminar. “I lost all my content and my entire business,” she says.

To Kush, the only possible explanation is that someone (likely the catfisher) reported her for a non-nude but suggestive photo in her header. “I was the most vanilla person. I never pushed the limits of what was allowed,” Kush said. “But it’s a big fat terms-of-service gray area.”

While some sex-work directory sites do still exist online, the 2014 federal takedown of popular web hub RedBook hastened a shift that was already in the offing: sex workers taking their marketing into their own hands via social media. “Sex workers have to be hyper, hyper social-media-literate,” says PJ Sage, a cam model and sex work researcher. “At least 50 percent of your time is spent promoting and marketing.” All of which means that a sex worker’s social-media account doesn’t look that different than the average millennial’s: posing open-armed on the Great Wall of China, sipping Bellinis on balconies, pouting in bikinis.

But as social media has become more popular than ever for sex work—which encompasses everything from paid nude photos to webcam modeling to high-end escort services—all of it is strictly against platforms’ rules regarding sexual content, which are loosely based on United States prostitution law. And, like Kush, workers’ accounts are often shut down without warning or explanation, even when their content never ventures into explicit territory. So they’re feeling more than a little betrayed by the platforms they feel they helped create.

This isn’t a single-platform problem. Among aspiring porn performers, Snapchat is popular because off-label use of Snapcash allows them to charge clients for video clips. YouTube is where sex workers go to let their personalities shine, often in an attempt to transcend sexwork and become social media celebrities. According to Melissa Brown, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland researching black women’s erotic labor, the grandmasters of this technique are stripper-turned-celebs like Blac Chyna and Cardi B (whose social media brand was her first “money move”).

And Twitter, with its, oh, let’s call it “inconsistent” approach to policy enforcement, is a bit of a Wild West. It’s easier to get away with nude photos, but the cost of doing business is often high—as Kush can attest. After her account was deleted, she made another; it was shadowbanned. When she made a third, it was once again replicated by catfishing copycats. “The moment you get suspended, that gets the attention of people that want to imitate you and be malicious about it,” Kush says. “Someone messaged me confessing he’d been talking to a fake account for three weeks.” It became so bad for business that Kush—like many sex workers nowadays—moved to Instagram.

If you’re an aspiring high-end escort like Estelle Lucas, Instagram is the only place to connect with the most coveted of clients: wealthy men of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Lucas, who bills herself as “the premier escort in Melbourne,” has a few thousand followers and a quirky vibe. She frequently posts ribald memes alongside her lingerie shots—“Come for the boobs, stay for the cat videos,” says her bio—most with her face either turned away from the camera or blurred out.