How do I protect myself and my business from scams when tutoring online internationally?

While most of your clients will probably be serious, or at least not scammers, even an occasional scammer can be a problem. In order to avoid or limit the chances of being scammed, it is advisable that you always do some screening before accepting a new client, people with a shady social media profile, potential clients complaining about you hourly rates from the very beginning, inquiries that just do not sound genuine, inquiries from countries where the on-going tutoring rates are much lower than yours, these are all potential clients you would not want to deal with. As a second important point, you should always make sure you have enough evidence showing that tutoring has taken place, ideally after each lesson, should the client try to scam you by claiming that he did not receive the service. Even though scams from clients are rare, they do occur occasionally. Some client may have a lesson or receive some other tutoring service and then complain that they did not receive what they expected and want to get a refund; if that happens, depending on the payment method they used, you may be in trouble. Paypal, for example, is notorious (or at least used to be since it may have somewhat improved on that front) for solving disputes in favour of the buyer; that does not happen all the time, but you can find a lot of bad stories on the internet. Note that your terms and conditions, even if clearly written, could or rather would not mean anything to the payment company, one more reason to be proactive when selecting your clients to avoid potential problems.

There are also other scams, usually involving a cheque, where you are supposed to make a payment in advance only to find out later on that the cheque was fake. This scam usually starts with a general and rather unspecific enquiry, where either the supposed client is expected to soon relocate in your area, or the tutor is expected to relocate abroad and be hired by the client. They often simply refer to your area without giving more specific details about the location. This way they can send out the same email to tons of tutors hoping to scam some of them.

Other common types of scam involve tutoring agents; they will try to make you believe that they are well established in a specific area, for example in a major city, and can provide you tons of students. They want you to pay in advance and usually sell leads; the tutor either pays per lead or through a monthly subscription to have access to an unlimited number of leads; those leads, whether they are real or fake or even expired, are usually sold to many tutors and usually give a grand return of zero clients. If you ask one of such agents to provide evidence that they can indeed find students for you, the evidence they provide is usually scant at best. They also often do not have a clear online presence such as a legit website you can refer to or the website appears to be quite shady.

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