Check mode: the photos
Are these photos of the flat, or of somebody else's flat?
Fake listings need pictures, and inventing pictures is hard, so most of them steal. The photos usually come from a genuine advert somewhere else — often a property that was for sale, in a different city, sometimes in a different country. Reverse image search is how you catch that, and you can do it yourself in about two minutes. Our check does it automatically on the photos in a listing you paste. Both are worth understanding, including where both of them stop being useful.
Last updated: 24 July 2026
- Photos of a real property found on an unrelated listing elsewhere is one of the strongest signals a listing is copied.
- You can do this by hand right now with Google Lens, TinEye or Yandex — no account, no cost.
- A match is not automatically theft. The same advert legitimately appears on several portals at once.
- Finding nothing means nothing. Original-looking photos do not make a listing real, and a scammer can photograph a flat they do not own.
How do I reverse image search a listing myself?
Save the listing's photos, or copy their image address, and feed them to a reverse image engine. Do it for two or three different photos rather than one — a scammer sometimes mixes one original shot in with a set of stolen ones.
- Google Images or Google Lens: drag the photo in, or paste the image URL. The broadest index of the three.
- TinEye: strongest at finding the oldest known copy of an image, which is what tells you who had it first.
- Yandex Images: often the best at matching interiors and architecture that the others miss.
- On a phone, long-press the photo and use the built-in visual-search option, then repeat with a second photo.
I found the same photos on another site. What does that mean?
It depends entirely on what the other page is, which is the part most guides skip. There are three ordinary explanations and only one of them is bad news.
| What you found | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The same property, same city, on another rental portal | Normal syndication — one advert published in several places | Check the details agree; a different rent for the same flat is the tell |
| The same property advertised for sale, or years ago | The photos were lifted from an old or unrelated advert | Treat the listing as copied until proven otherwise |
| A different address, a different city, a different country | The strongest form of this signal — the flat in the photos is not the flat being offered | Do not pay. Ask for a live video walkthrough naming today's date |
| A stock-photo site, a shop, a video thumbnail, a social post | Noise. Generic interiors match all sorts of unrelated pages | Ignore it — this is not evidence either way |
Why doesn't “no match found” mean the listing is real?
Because the absence of evidence is not evidence. A reverse image search only sees what a search engine has already crawled and kept. A photo stolen from a private group, a closed portal, a message thread or a listing that has since been taken down will not turn up, and neither will one taken by the scammer themselves in a flat they were shown as a prospective tenant.
This is why our check reports a clean reverse-image result as information rather than reassurance, and why the sentence it returns says so directly. Any tool that turns "we found nothing" into a green tick is telling you something it does not know.
What our automatic check does differently
The naive version of this check counts how many websites a photo appears on and warns when the number is high. That produces constant false alarms, because a legitimate advert is syndicated across portals and served from image CDNs, and because generic interiors partially match thousands of unrelated pages.
Ours works on identity instead of volume. Image CDNs and shared storage hosts are dropped before anything is judged, because those are where a listing's own photos live. Large non-listing sites — video, social, shops, stock libraries, encyclopedias — are dropped too, because a partial match there is noise, not a competing advert. Every remaining page is then screened for whether it is actually a property listing, and a warning is only raised when the photos appear on a listing for a genuinely different property.
- Fail-safe by design: when the screening is unsure, the result is reported as information, never as a warning.
- The check runs on the photos in the listing we opened, and on photos you upload yourself.
- You always see which sites were involved, so you can open them and compare the address and the rent yourself.
What to do when the photos look stolen
Do not open with an accusation — a real landlord whose photos were themselves stolen will react the same way an innocent person does, and you want information rather than a confrontation.
- Ask for a live video call from inside the property, with them naming today's date and showing the street from a window.
- Ask for one specific photo that does not exist yet — the view from the kitchen, the meter cupboard, the entrance door with a hand in frame.
- Compare the address in the other advert you found with the one you were given. A different address ends the conversation.
- Do not send money, a deposit, a holding fee or your ID while this is unresolved.
Frequently asked questions
Is reverse image searching a rental listing legal?
Yes. You are searching for publicly published images using a public search engine, which is exactly what those engines are for. You are not copying, republishing or altering anything.
The landlord sent photos by WhatsApp rather than posting a listing. Can I still check them?
Yes, and you should — photos sent privately are more likely to be stolen than a public advert's, because nobody else has ever reviewed them. Save them and upload them, or run them through Google Lens yourself.
The same listing appears on three portals with three different rents. Is that a scam?
It is a strong reason to slow down. Syndication across portals is normal; the rent changing between them is not. Contact the property through the portal with the most established presence and ask which figure is correct.
Can a scammer defeat a reverse image search?
Yes, easily — by cropping, mirroring, re-compressing or taking their own photos during a viewing. That is precisely why this check is one signal among several and never a verdict on its own.
Do you keep the photos I upload?
No. Photos are used to run the check and are not retained afterwards. The verdict is logged; the images are not.