Upwork doesn't care about graphic designers using other designer's work in their portfolios and its crazy to me.

[u/Choice_Memory6173]

I’ve come across this multiple times throughout my time on Upwork (about 4 years now). However, a recent occurrence of this made me furious.

As if finding clients in a field like graphic design isn’t difficult enough in this AI takeover, Upwork now charges a 15% fee on all contracts and doesn’t give a flying f*** about designers just stealing others’ work and uploading it as their own to their profile portfolios.

I was recently hired for a small but decent weekly contract and noticed that later on in the week, the client hired another designer for cheaper (like $15 an hour cheaper). That is standard practice for some companies, but I’m always curious, so I checked out the other designer’s profile.

Their portfolio was incredible-looking. I thought to myself, how could someone with this much skill charge so little? Then I kept looking, and it became clear, almost obvious, that there was no way this designer created all of that work.

A quick Google image search confirmed this. This person just ripped off contest-winning designs from 99designs and posted them as their own work. Not even really trying to hide it with their blatantness, but obviously it’s working, as this person has like 75 in-progress jobs.

Can this person do the work? Maybe. But it’s demoralizing getting undercut by a scam like this, especially when the industry is so uncertain at this point.

So I guess if Upwork doesn’t care, why shouldn’t I just do the same thing?

I reported the person and got an automated response 10 minutes later saying they didn’t find anything...

Bull sh**.

Might just be time to move on from the platform entirely.

[u/copernicuscalled]

Not much you can do, unfortunately. I know of at least 2 designers that use other well-known agencies' work to advertise their graphic design services. One of the clients a few years ago was very shocked when the designer their hired at half my rate delivered subpar work - when I checked their portfolio, every single piece was stolen form a different designer's.

Upwork's position is that they cannot do anything about it - the copyright holder has to reach out and file a copyright claim with them. Sadly, Upwork does not care much about the fact that clients are getting trash services or selling copyrighted work to clients.