Fiverr.com Caveat Emptor

At the suggestion of Ivan Van Norman, to get artwork and logos made before the January 22nd brodcast at WotC's Dragon Talk, I attempted to make use of a gig service called Fiverr.com. This has been a mixed experience...

List of scam artist on Fiverr:

jisum1 - For some reason account not yet terminated. :-( Artwork stolen blatantly from World of Warcraft. Copyright violation.
jonsondevago - For some reason account not yet terminated. :-( Stolen artwork. Copyright violation.
karlasn - For some reason account not yet terminated. :-( Stolen artwork. Copyright violation.
Nickylong - Succeeded in getting their account terminated. Never delivered anything. Never answered. Take the money & try to run, but failed.
mvklirtm4414 - For some reason account not yet terminated. :-( Stolen straight from Everyverse RPG book. Copyright violation.
olicia1802 - Succeeded in getting their account terminated. Unbelievably bad cut/paste photos work.
rayhansany - Succeeded in getting their account terminated. Blatantly stole from Dragon Age Inquisition. Copyright violation.
artmafiafox - For some reason account not yet terminated. :-( For a simple logo, agreed to $25, then days later demanded $125 more. Bait & switch.
palwasha_sajid1 - several days after agreeing to order, and my paying them, tried to raise another $130. Bait & switch.

Fiverr.com (I believe) is owned by Freelancer.

The site has a wide range of arists from visual artists to writers, etc.

I first dipped my toe with some logo requests for RPG Research.

That went well enough, though there was a lot of back and forth. In the end, out of 8 logos, there are 2 that both I, and the public, can't seem to decide upon. The polls have been 50/50. They both have pros and cons.

More importantly, the artist was legitimate, the pricing extremely low, and the experience was positive.

I then tried another couple of artists for logos for the RPG Trailer and RPG Education. The one for RPG Education went well and ultimately I decided on this one:.

However the RPG Trailer did not go as well. One artist was the same I used for the first RPG Research logo, and they did okay, as you can see here between the "logo", and "mascot". But I wanted something more stylized. So i took those and submitted them to another artist.

That one turned out to be completely bogus. And I experienced for the first time the cancellation process through Fiverr.

Meanwhile, I wanted original artwork for the back of the RPG Trailer, based on a vision I have had for a dozen years. And additional artwork could be used on our brochures, websites, videos, and other parts of the trailer.

It is a difficult and complicated order, and I wanted a variety of options, so I engaged more than a dozen artists ranging anywhere from $60 to $300.

Well, so far I have had to cancel 4 of those due to including blatantly stolen intellectual property (IP).

One even just directly ripped from Dragon Age Origins shamelessly (and crappily).

So far only 1 artist has shown me some early drafts, clearly proving original artwork.

Also I engaged one artist for a video intro/outro.

I wanted to support new artist, and that is where I was bitten the worst.

Which is a shame for any legitimate artist trying to get traction.

Also, I think some of the scammers were either the same person or in the same scam "shop".

Caveats:

As much as I want to support new artist, Fiverr clearly does not do anything to vet their artists, so unfortunately you should only go with artists that have dozens of ratings at least, and are as close to 5.0 as you can manage, and have been on the platform more than 1 year.

Fiverr takes some whopping fees for not doing any vetting.

Cancellation does not put your money back on your card, it saves it as in-store credit. You can contact customer services later to have it transferred back to your cards, with "optional processing fees" tacked on yet again. They also warn that they limit the number of times you can do this, though it is apparently an arbitrary limit, they don't provide a number.

If you leave the money in-store, then your future purchases will not have added processing fees.

Others have told me they have been much happier working with artists directly through Deviant Art, and were not impressed with what I have been sharing on my Discord server about my experience with Fiverr.com

At this point I can't say that I overly recommend them to others. We'll see how it goes with the rest of the artists.

Fiver needs to come up with some method that weeds out the scammers, so that new artists can have a chance to get work.

Here are the crappy examples mentioned above:

Fiverr scam fraud artist jisum1:

Fiverr.com scam artist fraud jisum1