Stolen Faces, Shared Anger: Adelaide Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement Scams

At least a dozen Adelaide-based residents have come forward in recent weeks describing how their personal photographs — taken from social media profiles, business directories, and community websites — were quietly replaced or duplicated across unrelated listings, fake profiles, and promotional material they never authorised. The problem, long treated as a niche digital nuisance, is drawing fresh urgency as South Australia's tech sector expands and more residents build professional identities online.

The timing matters. Lot Fourteen, the North Terrace innovation and space precinct that has become home to dozens of startups, defence contractors, and research bodies, has actively encouraged founders and employees to maintain visible digital profiles. More South Australians than at any point in the state's recent history are publishing headshots, biographies, and portfolio images as part of grant applications, government tender processes, and LinkedIn presences tied to programs like the hydrogen jobs plan. That visibility has a cost when images can be scraped, duplicated, and redeployed without consent.

What Community Members Are Experiencing

People affected described a common pattern. A profile photograph — typically a professional headshot or a candid image tagged at a location — appears on a second platform or listing the person never created. In some cases the duplicate image is attached to a fake service provider advertising in suburbs like Salisbury or Mawson Lakes. In others it turns up on overseas e-commerce sites or in AI-generated content farms. The original owner typically discovers it by accident, often through a reverse image search.

Several residents in the inner-east, including parts of Norwood and Kensington, said they had lodged complaints with the eSafety Commissioner, Australia's national regulator for online safety, only to wait weeks before receiving an automated acknowledgement. The eSafety Commissioner's office handles image-based abuse complaints under the Online Safety Act 2021, which came into force on 23 January 2022 and includes provisions covering non-consensual sharing of intimate images, though the threshold for action on non-intimate duplicate image misuse is narrower and harder to meet.

Community legal centres have also seen a rise in inquiries. Uniting Communities Legal Services, which operates from offices on Franklin Street in the Adelaide CBD, has confirmed it fielded a growing number of digital identity and image misuse queries over the past financial year, though the organisation has not published specific case numbers publicly. The Consumer and Business Services division of the South Australian government, located on Grenfell Street, handles some related complaints under state fair trading laws, but residents say they are routinely told that image scraping alone falls outside its jurisdiction.

The Gap Between Law and Experience

Australia's Privacy Act 1988, currently under a staged reform process following the federal government's response to the 2022 Privacy Act Review, does not yet impose a direct obligation on platforms to remove duplicate or misappropriated non-intimate images at a private individual's request. The proposed introduction of a statutory tort for serious privacy invasions — recommended in the review — would change that calculus, but no commencement date has been set as of July 2026.

That legislative gap leaves affected residents in a manual, time-consuming process: filing individual takedown requests with each platform, attempting to verify identity to Google's or Meta's satisfaction, and in some cases engaging a solicitor to send cease-and-desist correspondence — a step that costs between $300 and $800 at most Adelaide general practice law firms, according to publicly available fee schedules.

For those navigating the system now, advocates suggest starting with a reverse image search using Google Images or TinEye to document where a photograph has appeared, then filing with the eSafety Commissioner if any sexual or threatening element is present. For purely commercial misuse, a formal written complaint to the platform combined with a Consumer and Business Services inquiry is the recommended first step. The Australian Cyber Security Centre, based in Canberra but with liaison contacts through the Lot Fourteen-adjacent Defence SA office, also maintains a ReportCyber portal for identity-related digital incidents. None of these pathways is fast. Residents say that is precisely the problem.