2026-08-11
Why do fake listings keep using your real photos — and does a watermark actually help?
Search your own address on Facebook Marketplace some day and there's a real chance you'll find your own home — or one that looks exactly like it — listed for rent by a total stranger, at a suspiciously low price, with a phone number that isn't yours. That isn't a one-off horror story a local news team dug up for a slow news day. The FTC put an actual number on it in December 2025: nearly 65,000 rental scams reported since 2020, about $65 million lost, and — in the FTC's own words — a documented pattern of exactly how those fake listings get made: by copying a real one.
What the FTC's own December 2025 numbers say
The FTC's data spotlight, published December 2025, is drawn from consumer reports filed directly with the agency, not a survey or an estimate:
| What the FTC found | Number |
|---|---|
| Rental scams reported, Jan 2020 – Jun 2025 | ~65,000 |
| Total reported losses | ~$65 million |
| Median loss per report | $1,000 |
| Scams that started with a fake ad on Facebook (12 mo. ending Jun 2025) | ~50% |
| Scams that started on Craigslist | 16% |
| How much more likely ages 18–29 are to lose money than other adults | 3x |
That last line matters for who this actually hits: renters in their 20s, hunting for an apartment on a deadline, are the group the FTC's own numbers say loses money most often — not a hypothetical "someone gullible," but the ordinary case of anyone apartment-hunting under time pressure.
How the theft actually works, in the FTC's own words
The FTC's December 2025 press release describes the mechanic directly, not as a guess: "Rental scams usually involve fake rental listings, which can often look very real and copy information from legitimate listings but are posted with the scammer's contact information on different sites." A scammer doesn't need to invent a fake apartment from scratch — they take a real listing's photos and description (often a real landlord's, sometimes a home that's actually for sale, not for rent at all), repost it somewhere else with their own phone number or email swapped in, and collect an application fee or security deposit for a unit they have no connection to. The photos aren't incidental to the scam — they're the part that makes a fake ad look exactly as credible as the real one it was lifted from.
What a watermark can and can't do about this
To be direct about the limits first: a watermark does not stop someone from screenshotting your listing and reposting the whole thing, contact info and all — nothing short of the platform taking the fake ad down does that. What a visible watermark does do is remove the easiest version of the theft: a scammer who wants a clean, uncredited photo they can pass off as their own listing now has to either leave your name sitting in the photo (which undercuts the "this is mine" pitch the scam depends on) or crop it out — and a corner stamp is trivial to crop, while a watermark tiled across the whole frame isn't, because there's no watermark-free rectangle left inside the photo to crop down to without cutting into the room, the car, or the couch that was the point of the photo in the first place. It's also worth being precise about what a watermark is versus what it isn't: it's pixels baked into the image, not file metadata — which matters because most platforms, Facebook included, routinely strip a photo's EXIF/metadata fields (camera model, GPS, timestamps) from the copy other people can download, the same way NearIMG's own canvas-based export doesn't carry metadata forward either. A copyright note living only in metadata wouldn't survive a repost either way; a watermark burned into the visible pixels does, corner-crop aside.
How to watermark a listing or item photo in NearIMG
NearIMG's Watermark tool is a plain text stamp, not a logo uploader, which is exactly what a name, handle, or "contact [you], not this listing" line needs:
- Open your listing or product photo (drag-and-drop, paste, or the file picker — nothing uploads anywhere).
- Type the text — your name, your rental company, or a line like "verify with [phone number]" works better here than a generic "© 2026" would.
- Pick a position: a single corner (bottom-right, bottom-left, top-right, top-left, or center) for a light touch, or Tile to repeat it across the whole frame for the version a crop can't remove.
- Adjust size (2–20% of the image) and opacity (10–100%) so it's legible without covering the parts of the photo that are actually selling the room or the item, and pick a color that reads against the photo.
- Save. The watermark is drawn permanently into the exported pixels — there's no layer to peel back off it later.
What this doesn't fix
A watermark protects your photo; it doesn't verify someone else's listing for you. If you're the one apartment-hunting, the FTC's own advice is separate from anything a watermark can do: search online for the property address or the landlord/company's name together with words like "scam" or "complaint" before you pay anything, and never wire money or pay by gift card for a unit you haven't verified. And on the posting side, a watermark can't stop a screenshot of your whole listing, including the parts that weren't images at all — it only closes the "crop the corner off and it's untraceable" version of the theft, not every version.
The short version
The FTC's own December 2025 numbers put real figures on something that used to be just a bad feeling: nearly 65,000 rental scams since 2020, about $65 million lost, and a documented pattern of scammers copying real listings' photos wholesale rather than inventing fake ones. A single corner watermark is a speed bump a crop tool erases in one step; a watermark tiled across the whole photo, baked into the pixels rather than metadata a platform strips anyway, is the version that survives being cropped down to whatever a scammer was hoping to pass off as their own.