It's mostly on F-list that people steal art to go roleplaying with their yiff-fag-murr-purr.

There's not a lot you can do about it, people steal my art all the time and use it on Furry facebooks and other shit, but yeah, I'll keep a lookout.

In other words people, don't be a dick head.

Here is the thing.
The people that take pictures of somebody's character/characters don't care.
A lot of the time, they don't even have an FA. They just have a facebook, flist, tumblr, or a username on some imageboard or something.
As more and more artist and character owners try and put a stop to this, there are even more people, usually teens and young adults, that are popping up into the fandom and have no idea of what they are doing. So they don't know that it is wrong, even when you tell them it's wrong. It's because those people don't care.
I've only found two people using my character, both of which I got them to take the images down. Both were on Facebook.
I believe that there are literally dozens of people who use EVERY character there is.

This pretty much, all it takes is for an image to appear on google or some image search engine and someone can wind up using it and the image not even being directly linked to you the artist nor the owner. I think its a pretty frequent occurrence to be honest there's not a great deal you can do about it besides putting a giant watermark through the entire image and no one likes that.

When I find people using characters I know, or characters drawn by an artist I know, I confront them and they usually say that they found it on a site like e621 and that they think its alright.

I wish people would just get some originality and come up with their own characters instead of stealing them.

As someone who's been guilty of this, it's not always a lack of originality. Many times, someone will make a character and have a great concept, but no visual. They'll stumble across something on e621, deviantart, 4chan, etc. and realize how close that random picture comes to how they picture their character (and others may, as another example, use a picture of a celebrity to represent their character). Of course, there are also others who will steal a character's art and concept both. But I think many of them just don't have the artistic skills to portray their character visually and they may be unaware that artists can be commissioned to do such things. I'm definitely not saying it's right to use someone's art without permission, but I think it's most often ignorance rather than conscious "thievery".

I hear and read journals on this subject a lot, is it really so hard for "some" people to be creative.

I don't think I ever ran into that yet as far as my own art goes.