Lucia Cole appeared to be a promising new singer, until two Ariana Grande fans discovered that her whole persona was fake, including the album she had on iTunes.
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To a handful of music fans, Lucia Cole seemed like a promising up-and-coming R&B singer with a strong '90s-style voice. She had a popular Twitter account, a Wikipedia page, and songs on iTunes, Tidal, and Spotify. She was in talks to be in an upcoming Tyler Perry project, and had collaborated with Drake and Ariana Grande. Message boards were lighting up with a rumors about her personal life: She was dating NFL player Kenny Vacarro, who was cheating on his baby's mother with her, and she had dated Sony record executive Keith Naftaly, who was 27 years older than her.
There was only one problem: Lucia doesn't exist at all. And her songs on iTunes? They were all actually old Jessica Simpson tracks.
Lucia Cole had an album called Innocence on iTunes. Every song was actually a Jessica Simpson song with a slightly altered title.
Lucia's iTunes page.
iTunes (deleted) / Via popculturediedin2009.tumblr.com
What makes the story of Lucia Cole as a "catfish" particularly interesting is who broke the story. It wasn't some sort of copyright protection software on iTunes or YouTube or music journalists who discovered that Lucia was fake. In fact, Lucia had managed to get a few interviews with the music press — on the sites Music Times and Bossip, a pop culture site that focuses mostly on black celebrities and musicians.
The two people who broke the story wide open were two male teenage pop culture junkies. The person to first crack the case was Leo Loera, a 19-year-old college freshman from Fresno, California. Leo is a die-hard Ariana Grande fan (her fans call themselves "Arianators," similar to Justin Bieber's Beliebers, or Lady Gaga's Little Monsters, or the Grateful Dead's Deadheads), and Lucia caught his attention when she tweeted that Ariana Grande would appear on her upcoming album.
"It was really interesting because I had never heard the name before, and I'm kind of a music head myself so usually I know a lot about up and coming artists, indie or not."
Leo got more suspicious when he looked at her Twitter. "Her bio said that she was a platinum singer-songwriter when she was barely coming out with a debut album, and that didn't really add up to me. And then I went on her Wikipedia and there were a lot of things on her page that made it seem like she wrote it herself."
He searched her on YouTube and listened to a few of her songs. At first, Leo liked what he heard — he loves vocalists with a big strong voice and a '90s vibe, like Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. But he couldn't shake the feeling that the voice sounded like another powerhouse female vocalist he liked: Jessica Simpson. Leo liked Jessica and was familiar with her voice, but didn't know her earlier album tracks (literally no one alive, except maybe Joe Simpson, remembers 1999 Jessica Simpson album cuts).
With a little YouTube searching, Leo found the Jessica Simpson song from Lucia's album. The song titles were slightly altered — Jessica's "Your Faith in Me" became Lucia's "Faith in Me." He checked the song lyrics online and saw they were an exact match. At this point, Leo was sure that Lucia had simply uploaded an entire Jessica Simpson album to iTunes and passed it off as her own.
He started DMing other Arianators and told them about his discovery. A large Ariana Grande fan account tweeted about it, and the jig was up. They started poking at Lucia on Twitter, asking her about Jessica to see what kind of reaction she'd have.