She told me that she had trying to post photos lifted from the internet onto AW and pass them off as her own and they had immediately spotted this and taken her profile down(so AW do check after a fashion)
She's giving AW too much credit. They seem to rely on punters running reverse-image searches on new profiles in order to find stolen photos. If profiles with stolen pictures are reported to them they will then take the offending profile down.
However, it would be incredibly easy for AW to check the photos as they're uploaded onto the profile and reject any photos that have hits elsewhere on the web. They don't do that since they're still taking a percentage of the private gallery sale for the profile, stolen pics or not. This is likely to be a lot of cash since brand new profiles attract the most interest.