There is no possible way that this will be able to be encompassed into one part so my first free post will be Part One of this wild ride that I’ve been on for 8 years. This covers (roughly) the first 24 hours after posting about SJK Photography and encountering the duo known as Billcie. The rest will be for subscribers!
If you are newer to Photo Stealers you may have missed the original post where we all came to know Stacie (and her boyfriend Bill) aka Billcie. Here is the original post. Grab popcorn, a drink, comfy pants and be prepared for an epic saga.
Billcie was a rare case where I did post more beyond the photo stealing because of how wild it all got but this is one of the cases I’m asked about most often so I thought it’d be a good storytime for the substack.
In January 2015 I had a few messages on the Facebook Page inbox notifying me that a fairly popular photographer had posted to her page that another fauxtographer, SJK Photography run by Stacie Klein in Florida, had stolen images that she took for a catalog and was posting them as their own. Later I would have clients contact me claiming that SJK also delivered photos of babies (detail photos of ears, hands, feet etc.) that were not of their child.
Since that January I was slower I started working on the post assuming, wrongly, that it would be just your usual post. Typically I make a post, the photographer gets big mad, then deletes and I move onto the next post. Sometimes there is a dust up for a day or two but rarely does it go beyond that. This one… has defied every norm I ever thought I knew with fauxtographers.
Stacie claimed initially that it was hackers, which is not uncommon so whatever. I think this post may predate the blog post by a bit so it may have been due to the people commenting from seeing it on Frosted Production’s Facebook Post.
After the post went live there were comments on Facebook and Disqus as usual but mostly commenting how the photos Stacie stole were not comparable in quality to the images that appeared to be hers. Which is very common discourse after I post a thief where there is a disparity in the quality of images they post vs. the images they steal.
Eventually SJK Photography was notified and she and Bill initially started their reign of terror in the comment section on the blog.
At the same time I was getting emails to my personal business page contact form with threats of a DDOS attack and other lovely threats and name calling.
Since I never back down and instead dig in when I’m threatened, I decided to dig into the web cache of SJK Photography’s website and Facebook Page and find more stolen images and add them to the post.
That went over well.
They retaliated by giving me a bunch of negative reviews on my Facebook Page for my business.
Eventually they found Photo Stealers on Facebook and started commenting. While it was mostly Bill and Stacie, there was also a friend who is a lawyer and a fake accounts commenting too acting like a client.
Eventually my lawyer will report Samantha to the MI bar for her antics on the thread and she gets an official smack for her bullshit in the thread.
The original photographers of the images that Stacie stole are NOT having Samantha’s bullshit and are quick to WTF Samantha trying to claim that the images are actually Stacie’s.
Bill also sends me this message via Facebook.
Bill and Stacie also decide to go forth and not only message threats to many people in the Facebook comments but also leave negative reviews for any businesses linked.
The following day I share the review Stacie kindly left for my photography business and things really light up in the comments.
I will leave you with the most hilarious interaction I’ve ever had: the birth of the closet whore.
Trust me, while this all seems wild.. it gets even more bananas. If hearing the behind the scene stories like how a ship-a-dick someone sent to Stacie had her calling the bomb squad to her house and blaming me (while I watched it all unfold on my laptop sitting on my deck in Nantucket) then pay up bitches ;)