CozyNet Blog

Fake images polluting eBay, Craigslist, Zillow, etc...

Publish Date: 2026-09-25

Oh wow, I suddenly want to buy this place now!...

Before I start, I want to clarify that I'm mostly writing about second hand stuff and resell where real images of items and their condition are important. I've been seeing a trend on e-commerce sites and the like where falsified images of items listed for sale are being used to conceal their true condition. This is unlike using stock photos of a product which are immediately obvious and easily visually filtered out. Rather, these are images of the very item itself touched up and enhanced so as to make it appear in better condition than perhaps it truly is. Sometimes the item will be situated in a fake setting with people using it similar to actual stock photography.

Since this is usually the first image of the product in a listing, it gets picked up by the sites catalog overview. Once you've clicked to see the rest of the images of the item, sometimes you'll get to see the truth but on the occasion I've seen it to where all of the images of the item are fake, so you never get to know the truth of its condition. Sometimes it's immediately obvious, even from the catalog thumbnail, but sometimes it's all quite well done with the watermark removed.

Before and after screenshot of Craigslist ads.

It has me suspicious now and second guessing everything I see!

Some realtors on Zillow have also taken to "touching up" "enhancing" or "conceptualizing" the condition of their properties. I especially dislike this because sometimes they won't ever show the truth and you'll never know it until you go out of your way to see it for yourself physically. It's still all quite obvious, but by this point you have little to no other option than to go to Google street view if every image is fake.

Thankfully most of them will clarify in the image that it's fake, but why bother at all with making it up when you have pictures of the real thing; what's going on here!? I want to see the real pictures! If it's a dump, then sell it as a dump and not a polished turd of a concept because I'll eventually find out and my time wasted for it. Time theft in this regard should be a prosecutable offense. Maybe I'm being too persnickety, but I can't deny that it's something I don't like seeing. The ones that don't disclose it and hide the watermarks probably don't even see it as lying or deception, thinking it to be no more different than McDonalds fake menu pictures of their burgers as if there's nothing wrong with it simply because of an already established precedent in false advertising, so in essence the real thing is replaced with an exaggerated falsified version of itself. As for those that do include the real images of their items or properties along side, it's not so bad then and I can live with that, but it can make the catalog view of these online commerce sites kind of useless because now I have to click thru to see the rest.

This was always an issue with online commerce since you can't tangibly see the product for yourself, which is why I still buy things like clothing in person, but the fake images polluting these sites aren't helping and unfortunately has made its way into online resell and second-hand thrifting...

The internet is becoming less and less usable day by day.

Thanks for reading my blog!