Dealing with questionable students

I don't know the answer but it sounds like you might have experienced the same problems I have.  I have registered here to try and supplement my income teaching genuine people.  I am of course interested to talk with people from different cultures but I have spoken with many people, being polite asking if they would like a free trial and possible future lessons, but I am plagued by people more interested in be-friending me.  I have also had people who say they cannot afford lessons but want to come and live with me.   I firmly tell them I am a professional teacher and if they are not interested in lessons, unfortunately I do not have the time to continue the conversation......I too, would be interested how other people deal with it.

Yes,I have experienced this thing when I was new here. I behaved strictly that time. Now as a teacher I will tell them to join me only for the language and tell them not to misuse sites like this for only entertainment, there are a lot of wwws to have fun, and I will not accept their talking invitation further

I've run into this too!  Besides being strict and firm I am not sure what else we can do as teachers/tutors.  Maybe there is some way that italki can make the distinction between Language Partner and Language Teacher a little clearer?  I think it would be useful if we had a checkbox in our profiles that let's us select if we want to be a Language Partner  as well as a Language Teacher. 

 Hello everyone,

I felt the same some times in my experience with iTalki, but that's the problem with open communities online. They are open to everyone and there will always be someone who is more interested in spamming, scamming, flirting, passing time, selling, etc, although many times the community sites have means of restricting their entrance when detected. All we have to do is to report the abusive usage to the technical team, but of course this is a highly fragile way of keepingpeople with this kind of interests at bay, because they can always log in with a different account...

Anyway, the mail address for abuse reporting is customer@italki.com.

I don't know other means of fighting this plague other the ones you already said, but I often don't reply those mails and usually they are the first and the last I receive.

Cheers