How Do I Verify Covering Letter?

[a53747af]

I posted my first project to design a web site. A few people replyied with covering letters listing their portfolio. How do I verify that it is really THEIR portfolio?

Your advise is appreciated in advance.

[yitwail · Accepted solution]

Boris, that's an excellent question. Instead of looking at their cover letters, look at their Upwork profiles, and click on each thumbnail in their Upwork portfolio. If a popup has a section titled This was made on Upwork: with a client review, then it's something the freelancer did for an Upwork client. Anything else could be plagiarized, so you'll just have to carefully read their reviews to decide if they seem legitimate. Good luck.

[lysis10]

One way is to right click the image and do a google search on it.

Sometimes, they list a portfolio item with the URL. You can go to the site and go to the bottom and see if they have a designer listed. Go to the designer's site and try to put 2 and 2 together.

Sometimes they steal templates from themeforest.net. You could browse there based on colors and name and see if you can find it.

I don't know of any other ways (maybe others have suggestions) other than contacting the site owner. Sometimes it's just too obvious like the wave of people who claimed to do PayPal's logo. Not the sharpest tools but tools nonetheless. 

Sometimes you can kinda tell it's fake because they have some cheap design that looks like a school project and then like this really nice design like they went from school to great designer in one leap. You could also do a search on their profile text. You might find plagiarism that way but just make sure you compare profiles found in google because sometimes the low end steal from people doing really well.

[a53747af]

John and Jennifer,

I really appreciate your advise.