Scammed Twice Over: Central Coast Residents Speak Out on Property Listing Photo Fraud

A Gosford renter handed over $2,200 in bond money last month for a Holden Street unit she had never physically inspected. The listing photos, clean, sun-lit, showing a renovated kitchen, turned out to belong to a legitimate rental in Terrigal that had been advertised eighteen months earlier. The Gosford property did not exist. She is still waiting to hear back from her bank.

Her story is not isolated. Across the Central Coast, from Wyong to Woy Woy, residents are reporting a surge in property listings, on rental platforms, private Facebook groups, and even some third-party aggregator sites, that recycle photographs lifted from genuine advertisements. The timing matters. Sydney's rental vacancy rate has stayed stubbornly tight throughout 2025 and into 2026, pushing more prospective tenants north toward the Central Coast, where commuter demand and post-pandemic sea-change appetite have compressed stock. Desperate renters are increasingly willing to commit quickly, and scammers know it.

Who Is Getting Caught Out

Community members who spoke to the Daily Central Coast, in person at the Gosford Library on Mann Street and through a local Facebook group run by the Central Coast Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service, described a pattern that is difficult to spot at first glance. Listings typically use high-quality images, plausible weekly rents sitting slightly below market rate, and contact details that route through disposable email addresses or overseas phone numbers. One Erina woman described discovering that photos of her own rental property, which she had legitimately advertised on a major platform in March this year, had reappeared in a fraudulent listing posted in the name of a fictitious landlord.

The Central Coast Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service, based in Wyong, has documented a rise in residents seeking help after losing money to fake listings. The service has been directing affected people toward NSW Fair Trading's formal complaints process, but advocates there acknowledge the process can be slow when fraudsters operate offshore and use anonymised accounts. NSW Fair Trading does maintain a scam reporting portal, and complaints can also be lodged with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission through its Scamwatch platform, which, as of its most recent annual data, recorded rental scams as among the top ten fraud categories by reported financial loss in Australia.

The photograph duplication problem has a technical dimension. Reverse image searching, available free through Google Images, can expose stolen photos in under thirty seconds, but many renters, particularly older residents and those unfamiliar with the tools, don't know this step exists. One Umina Beach resident said she had never heard of a reverse image search until a neighbour mentioned it after she had already transferred funds.

What Locals Can Do Right Now

Real estate agents operating out of the Gosford CBD have started adding visible watermarks and address overlays to listing photographs, a low-cost measure that at least raises the effort required to steal an image. Harcourts' Gosford office and several other agencies on Mann Street have reportedly adopted this practice informally, though there is no industry-wide Central Coast standard mandating it.

For renters, advocates recommend four steps before handing over any money: run every listing photo through a reverse image search; insist on a physical inspection before paying any bond or holding deposit; cross-check the landlord's name against the NSW Land Registry Services title search database, which charges $14.90 per property search; and report suspected fraudulent listings to the platform hosting them and to Scamwatch simultaneously. The Central Coast Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service can be reached through its Wyong office and offers free advice to tenants regardless of whether they have already lost money.

Central Coast Council's community services directorate has not yet announced a formal public awareness campaign targeting rental fraud, but community workers say informal outreach through Gosford Library's digital literacy program, which runs sessions on Tuesday mornings on Mann Street, has started incorporating photo verification as a standard module. The next session is scheduled for July 14.

For the Holden Street victim, the lesson came too late and too expensively. But she says she has since warned every person in her contact list to search before they sign.