Adelaide Residents Speak Out as Scammers Hijack Their Faces for Fake Listings

Tracey, a 44-year-old property manager from Prospect, first noticed something was wrong in February when a stranger knocked on her front door asking to inspect a rental she had never advertised. Her family photographs, taken from an old Facebook post, had been lifted, cropped and slapped onto a fake listing on a third-party classified site, offering her Marian Road home for $380 a week, several hundred dollars below the suburb's median rent. The listing had already attracted 23 enquiries.

Her case is not an isolated one. Across Adelaide, residents and small business operators are reporting a surge in what investigators at Consumer and Business Services South Australia are calling duplicate image fraud, the systematic theft of photographs from legitimate online listings, social media profiles and business websites to build convincing counterfeit advertisements. The problem has sharpened considerably in the first half of 2026, as more Australians hunt for affordable housing and secondhand goods in a cost-of-living squeeze.

Stolen Faces, Stolen Properties

In Bowden, a tradesman says photos of his ute, listed legitimately on Gumtree last October, reappeared in a Facebook Marketplace ad in May, selling the vehicle for $8,500 cash. He only found out because a workmate from the Gepps Cross industrial estate recognised the registration plate and sent him a screenshot. By the time he reported it, the post had been shared 14 times. Facebook removed the listing within 48 hours of his complaint, but the scammer's account had already vanished.

At the Lot Fourteen precinct on North Terrace, staff at a digital safety startup say they have been fielding calls from small operators whose product images have been scraped and redeployed on overseas platforms. One Norwood-based homewares retailer discovered photographs from her original Etsy store appearing on at least four separate counterfeit storefronts across three countries. "We had customers emailing us furious about orders they'd placed, orders we'd never received," she told The Daily Adelaide. Recovering the images from the fake sites took six weeks and involved formal takedown requests to platforms registered in the United States and Singapore.

Consumer and Business Services SA logged 412 complaints related to image-based listing fraud in the 12 months to June 2026, up 38 per cent on the previous year. The national figure, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Scamwatch report released in March, showed Australians lost more than $28 million to fake online listings in 2025 alone, with rental scams accounting for roughly one third of that total.

What Victims Are Being Told to Do

The South Australian Housing Authority issued updated guidance in May advising prospective renters to conduct reverse image searches on any listing photos before transferring money or signing documents. The authority specifically warned against listings that refuse video inspections or request payments through cryptocurrency or international wire transfers, two red flags that appeared in 61 per cent of rental fraud reports it assessed last financial year.

For those who have already had their images stolen, Consumer and Business Services recommends filing a report through its online portal at cbssa.sa.gov.au, lodging a separate complaint with Scamwatch, and watermarking any new photographs before posting them publicly. Adelaide's community legal centres, including the Migrant Workers Centre on Waymouth Street and the Inner City Legal Service operating from Angas Street, are offering free advice sessions on Thursdays for residents who have suffered financial loss and want to explore civil remedies.

Tracey from Prospect says she has since removed all public photos from her personal social media accounts and now adds a visible text overlay to any image she posts online. She got no money back, the scammer collected a holding deposit of $760 from one respondent before disappearing. "That person lost money because of my photos," she said. "That's what I can't shake." Her complaint to SA Police is still open. No charges have been laid.