Scoot ‘Sour’ Influencer Who Allegedly Photoshopped Himself into Stock Images

We receive many messages every day, and yesterday, there was one from a reader about a certain influencer who allegedly Photoshopped himself into stock images and shockingly implied that he had taken the images.

One of us took a look and said, “Nah, I don’t know this influencer” and just ignored that. (Sorry to the person who contacted us!)

Turned out, it’s a big story.

Mothership.sg wrote an excellent piece about it, turning an exposé into something so entertaining and fun to read that we love them even more now (we’ve always been fans of them).

So, to cut long story short, a certain influencer with over 100K followers, who’s also a photographer and videographer, went famous overnight (to be exact, he went famous overmorning) when the Mothership article was published.

Like what the reader told us, he apparently took stock images, posted them in Instagram and made them look like he had taken the photos.

In case you’re confused over what a “stock image” is, here’s one:

(We chose this for obvious reasons…no?)

But wait, this isn’t even remotely related to this article. Okay, here’s another one.

There, that’s better. Yeah, we were there, in Iceland (???).

So basically, stock images are images that can be bought over the Internet. For example, Goody Feed has a paid account with Shutterstock, allowing us to use up to a certain number of images a month while paying a fixed amount every month.

Users can also opt to buy individual images instead, though that is much more expensive.

If you’ve read our articles, you’ll see that we’ll have this credit in some of our images: myidiotbossisveryfat / Shutterstock.com .

That’s because even when we’ve paid for it, we still have to credit them in that specific manner.

There are many online stock images platforms – some are free (e.g. Unsplash) while some need payment (e.g. Shutterstock). Usually, there are more images to choose from in paid platforms, which is why we chose the paid plan.

But this article isn’t about stock images, or about the influencer. Mothership has already done the hard work of CSI-ing everything.

This article is about Scoot.

Scoot Jumped on the Bandwagon #LikeABoss

You’ve got to wonder if Scoot’s social media person, or the agency managing their online presence, used to work on the SCDF Facebook Page.

Hours after Mothership’s exposé, shots were fired immediately from Scoot.

With this:

If you can’t read the captions, here you go:

Why do Adobe Photoshop when you could be there for real? 😉 We fly to Athens starting from $219 🇬🇷!

Check out our Athens 1st anniversary (and Berlin inaugural launch) sale ✈ http://bit.ly/DAYsinEurope

Not only do we know immediately about their promotion, we also know more about the influencer saga immediately.

Not unexpectedly, the post garnered well over 2.1K Shares: more than the Shares in Mothership’s articles (as of now).

And the best part? Scoot’s troll-y replies to people who commented.

And well, according to a reply, that was them this morning:

Influencer is going to release a statement soon

According to MustShareNews, the influencer claimed that he has bought the images, and would be releasing a statement soon.

Well, one thing we can certainly help: we’ve got contacts in Shutterstock who actually wanted to give us a good discount for being a loyal customer should we pay annually instead of monthly. We’ll be glad to give him the discount instead.

And lest you’ve not noticed, I’ve used “the influencer” throughout instead of his name. The reason is simple: I, together with a few of my colleagues, seriously haven’t heard of him before, so it’s a motif to show how ignorant we are.

Artsy, isn’t it?

Or perhaps we’re too old for this Instagram thingy.

Now you know what Singaporeans are talking about today; do check back tomorrow for another piece of news of the day!