2015 saw the exposé of a “fake artist” who goes by the name of Lucia Cole, who created the identity over the computer in Louisiana, release an album on major music sites such as iTunes. The album credits have listed that the album was released under Republic Records. This is obviously fake because Lucia Cole is not even a real person and has no real music and has no video footage. Also, she uses pictures of other women, particularly pictures of model Reese Cromwell, which she claims are of her. Lucia Cole’s album itself, named Innocence, has no original material, merely music by Jessica Simpson from 1999 and one song by Bre. Lucia Cole claimed these songs as hers. All she did, the only original touch on the album, was that she slightly changed the titles of all the songs to make it less obvious. For instance, she changed the title of Bre’s song “You’re All That Matters” to “All That Matters”. Wow, what a creative genius and artistic innovator.
This story has been covered by major pop culture sources such as ATRL, Buzzfeed, Lipstick Alley, and ONTD. She was originally exposed on Twitter by Ariana fans (a.k.a. Arianators) when she claimed she was working with Ariana Grande, and her lie eventually unraveled. She was branded as the “next big thing” on online interviews on sites such as Bossip and Disqus; ironically, all these interviewers weren’t even interviewing a real artist, and that’s why all of her interviews are online. She even pretended to be a celebrity by trying to make it seem like she had thousands of followers on Twitter, but she bought all those followers. She also made a Wikipedia page about herself and wrote all sorts of lies such as writing and production credits, as if she actually worked with some of the most famous artists in the industry. The weirdest and most extreme thing, however, is that Shaquille O’Neal praised her album on Twitter and compared her to Mariah Carey. It’s insane that a fake person got this type of attention (it’s not like she bought that type of public recognition, but that Shaq actually discovered Lucia’s album and expressed his love over music that doesn’t belong to Lucia), and it’s sad that Bre’s excellent discography was discovered due to the discovery that a thief stole her music. It’s also insane that iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Tidal, and Amazon let Lucia release music that was completely stolen and already sung and released by other artists. She didn’t even make a cover album: she used Jessica Simpson’s and Bre’s voices in a literal copy-paste process. According to Lucia, the identity of Lucia was invented in the first place to get Trey Songz’s attention again after he broke up with the first catfish account. She’s obsessed with Trey Songz, and Lucia Cole isn’t the only identity this person has created, but definitely the most famous one. If I were to mention all of the identities, this post would go on forever.
*credit to npr.org for the picture