Not attack, but it was more confusing then anything: We always discouraged in our removals to message the mods personally so the entire team can see / review / intervene if needed, also it gets reactions much quicker (usually).

I had a very confusing spammer. I removed one of his posts, banned him for spam (checked the post history before and he was doing nothing else) and he wrote me invitations for his pyramid scheme nonsense. As said, writing personal messages to mods is a big nonono on our sub anyway, and I blocked him. He created half a dozen new accounts over weeks just to invite me to his spam over and over again.

On our sub the atmosphere got a lot better when we adopted /u/flair_helper. This way no redditor can see which mod was doing the removal, and so they can't message the mod in charge directly as they just don't know who to contact. Now they reach out via modmail which lowers tension.