Brisbane Residents Say Their Homes Have Vanished Online, Replaced by Strangers' Photos

Sandra Mwangi had been renting her Annerley townhouse for three years when a neighbour forwarded her a listing on a major rental platform: her own front door, her own kitchen tiles, her own backyard magnolia tree, advertised at $380 per week by someone she had never met. The listing had been live for at least four days before she found out.

Mwangi is not alone. Across Brisbane's tightening rental market, property owners and legitimate tenants are reporting a specific and frustrating problem: their photographs are being lifted from real listings and reused in fraudulent or duplicate posts, either to scam prospective renters or to inflate the apparent supply of available homes in a suburb. The issue has landed in the inboxes of local tenants' advocacy groups with growing frequency this year.

The Problem Has a Postcode Pattern

Residents in Logan Central, Inala, Woodridge, and parts of inner-west Brisbane, suburbs that have seen sharp rent increases as migrants from New South Wales and Victoria push further out from the CBD, report the highest concentration of complaints. The Tenants Queensland office on Boundary Street in Spring Hill has fielded calls from residents asking what legal options exist when their property's images are used without consent. Staff there direct complainants to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Scamwatch portal, though the process can take weeks to resolve.

One Inala resident who contacted The Daily Brisbane described spending nine days trying to get a fraudulent listing removed from a major platform. She had documented her original photos with metadata timestamps, but said the platform's automated reporting tool kept closing her ticket without human review. She asked not to be named because she feared the person behind the fake listing might retaliate.

A Woodridge landlord, who owns two properties on Wembley Road and asked to be identified only by his first name, David, said a duplicate image post of his rental had attracted at least six inquiries from would-be tenants who had already paid a holding deposit to a third party before anyone flagged the listing as fake. He said he only discovered the problem when one of those prospective tenants knocked on his door in person.

Why the Timing Matters

Southeast Queensland's population pressures are making this worse. Queensland's Department of Housing figures from early 2026 put the state's rental vacancy rate at historically low levels, with some inner-suburban postcodes sitting below one percent. When supply looks thin, renters move fast, and that urgency is exactly what fraudulent duplicate listings exploit.

The Gabba precinct redevelopment and broader 2032 Olympic infrastructure work has also pushed construction workers and contractors into an already stretched private rental market across the Woolloongabba, Kangaroo Point, and Coorparoo corridors. Several of those workers, many of whom relocated from interstate, told The Daily Brisbane they had nearly fallen for duplicate image listings before cross-checking addresses on Google Street View.

Advocacy groups have called on platforms to implement mandatory image-hash verification, a technical process that can flag when a photograph has already been used in another listing, before a new post goes live. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland has previously noted the need for stronger platform-level screening, though the pace of any industry-wide rollout remains unclear.

For now, the practical advice from Tenants Queensland is consistent: reverse image search every photo in a listing before transferring any money, verify the address exists on a mapping service, and never pay a holding deposit without a signed Form 18a, Queensland's standard tenancy agreement. If something looks wrong, report it to Scamwatch at scamwatch.gov.au and follow up directly with the platform's trust and safety team, not its general support queue, which tends to move more slowly.

Mwangi got her photos removed after six days. The person who posted them was never identified. Her listing was back to normal within the week, but she says she now watermarks every photo before it goes online, a precaution she wishes someone had told her about three years ago.