Photo Stealers - the dogdy side of photography...

Photo Stealers - Facebook page dedicated to thief catching.  

I was quite surprised to discover how many people steal work of others to boost their own portfolios...  Whole websites are made up of stolen images and plagiarized text. Lot's of work goes into cropping and retouching to remove the owner's watermarks with funny results sometimes. The cheek and arrogance of some of these fauxtographers amazes me -  it's quite often very clear which photos are their own (the bad ones) and which were stolen (pretty much the whole rest). Stupidity of these people is astonishing as well. It's actually very easy to check the provenance of a photo - Google Image Search is your friend here. 

There are also people and websites dedicated to exposing photo thieves. Once someone has been caught, the game is up - nothing ever disappears on line. Every on line search will show the "thief catching" stories and links to them.

Have a look at   Photo Stealers Facebook Page or their blog. Some people keep denying theft and dishonesty for a very long time before giving up. The lies they come up with can be quite entertaining too.