Perth Residents Lose Trust as Stolen Photos Flood Online Listings

A growing number of Perth residents say their personal and business photographs have been copied and reused online without permission, in fake rental listings, counterfeit product pages, and fraudulent service advertisements, raising questions about what protections exist and how quickly platforms respond when complaints are lodged.

The problem has sharpened in 2026 as housing demand in Perth's inner suburbs has surged, with vacancy rates sitting near historic lows. Scammers have seized on that pressure, scraping legitimate rental photos from real estate listings on sites like realestate.com.au and Domain and republishing them in fraudulent ads that ask prospective tenants to wire deposits to accounts they will never recover. The Office of the eSafety Commissioner has flagged image-based fraud as a rising category of complaint nationally, though the agency has not publicly released Perth-specific figures for the current financial year.

The Human Cost on Perth Streets

The people feeling this most acutely are not corporations. They are landlords in Subiaco who discover their Rokeby Road property photographs running in fake Gumtree ads. They are market stallholders at the Fremantle Markets on South Terrace who photograph their own handmade goods for Instagram, only to find those same images attached to offshore drop-shipping storefronts selling inferior knockoffs. They are photographers working out of studios in Northbridge's Aberdeen Street who find their portfolio work lifted and used in content mills without credit or compensation.

Community members describing their experiences on local Facebook groups dedicated to Perth renters and small business owners paint a consistent picture: platforms are slow, the takedown process is opaque, and by the time a fraudulent listing is removed, at least one person has usually lost money. One thread in the 'Perth Renters Advice' group, active as of late June, catalogued more than a dozen separate incidents involving properties in the northern suburbs of Joondalup and Wanneroo, areas where the Metronet extension and associated population growth have made rental competition especially fierce.

Small businesses registered with the City of Fremantle and the City of Perth have reported similar patterns. The Fremantle Chamber of Commerce has previously encouraged members to watermark product images and use reverse image search tools as a first line of defence, though the burden of monitoring still falls almost entirely on the individual business owner.

What the Evidence Shows

Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre, which sits within the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, recorded more than 239,000 scam reports nationally in 2024, a figure published in the ACCC's Scamwatch annual snapshot. The ACCC has noted that rental scams in particular tend to spike in cities with low vacancy rates, though it has not broken out a Perth-only figure publicly. Consumer Protection WA, the state's dedicated consumer agency, accepts complaints about misleading online listings and can investigate under the Australian Consumer Law as it applies in Western Australia.

The digital forensics are not complicated. Tools like Google Reverse Image Search and TinEye allow anyone to check whether a photograph has appeared elsewhere on the web, and both are free. The challenge is awareness. Many small operators and individual landlords in suburbs like Victoria Park and Mount Lawley say they had never thought to run such checks until something went wrong.

Intellectual property lawyers in Perth note that Australian copyright law automatically protects original photographs from the moment of creation, no registration is required, meaning the person who took the picture generally holds the right to demand its removal. The practical step, according to publicly available guidance from IP Australia, is to send a formal takedown notice directly to the platform hosting the infringing image, citing the Copyright Act 1968.

Anyone who believes they have been defrauded through a fake listing using stolen images should report to both Scamwatch at scamwatch.gov.au and Consumer Protection WA at commerce.wa.gov.au. Those whose images have been used without consent can file a complaint with the eSafety Commissioner at esafety.gov.au, which has the power to compel some platforms to act under the Online Safety Act 2021. The window matters, fraudulent listings move fast, and evidence screenshots taken immediately are far more useful than memories taken later.