Protect yourself from posers

[mtg]

A little while back, we caught a local "custom bike builder" stealing a picture of our manufacturing shop and using it to give the impression that they were actually fabricating frames (which they do not). A phone call later, and the offending picture was removed from their website, but it looks like they may be at it again.

This facebook post looked suspicious, so I did a Google search for other places on the web where it appears, and the other place it appeared was here on Velocipede. It looks like it is eRichie's shop to me. I may be wrong, but if that picture is from any of the folks in this community, I would suggest that you call out the offender.

In general, after we had a pic stolen, we checked the remaining pictures on our website. In Chrome, right click on a pic, and click "Search Google for this image" to see if anybody is using your pics elsewhere.

[zetroc]

Very few people have that table. That's as blatant as it gets.

[mtg]

That's what I figured.

I looked at some other recent posts by them, and this one also comes from here on VS, but is posted on their facebook page under the context that it is their setup.
And, the caption they used for the below pic was "Measure, mark, set, measure, pray, weld". Facepalm.

11856516_1051644041536160_6122660286536509420_o.jpg

[e-RICHIE]

[mtg]

One other tip: after we caught them stealing the pic from us, we started painting our logo on more of our tooling and fixtures in the shop. That way, he has to at least photoshop our logo out of pics that he steals in the future.

[alexstar]

Their instagram account has gone dark... though it had the same photo as the original post in this thread.