Ho Chi Minh City residents lose money to stolen listing photos

Linh, a landlord on Nguyen Van Huong street in Thao Dien, spent three weeks last month fielding calls from prospective tenants about a furnished apartment she had never listed. Someone had lifted her photos, shot herself on a phone, white walls and river-view balcony, and posted them on a competing property platform at 30 percent below her actual asking price of 18 million dong per month. By the time she traced the fake listing, four families had already wired holding deposits to a stranger.

The duplicate-image problem, where photographs are scraped from one platform or social media account and republished without permission, often to deceive consumers or undercut legitimate sellers, has surfaced as a tangible grievance across Ho Chi Minh City's property rental sector, street food delivery ecosystem, and small retail community. It is not new, but residents and small business owners say it has intensified sharply since 2024, tracking the explosion of low-cost listings on domestic platforms as the city's real estate market corrects downward from its 2022 peak.

A Problem Felt from Thao Dien to Cho Lon

The frustration runs across very different economic communities. In District 5's Cho Lon wholesale district, food importers say product images, photographed for their own Zalo and Facebook shop accounts, routinely appear on third-party Shopee and TikTok Shop storefronts selling inferior substitutes. One dried-goods trader on Phung Hung street described spending roughly 500,000 dong per week running reverse image searches across multiple platforms, a manual workaround that eats into margins already squeezed by higher warehouse rents along the Binh Chanh corridor.

The expat community in District 2 has its own version of the complaint. Facebook groups such as Expats in Ho Chi Minh City, which counts more than 80,000 members, regularly carry posts warning about fake property listings using duplicated photos. Members describe apartments advertised near the British International School on Tran Nao street that do not exist at the posted price, or sometimes do not exist at all. The posts function as a community alert system, but they also reveal that no centralised reporting mechanism catches these listings before money changes hands.

Vietnam's Law on Cybersecurity, which took effect in January 2019, and the Ministry of Information and Communications' Decree 13/2023 on personal data protection both contain provisions that can apply to unauthorised image use, but enforcement at the level of individual rental or retail listings is rare. The Vietnam E-Commerce Association, known as VECOM, noted in its 2025 annual report that fake or misleading product representations remain among the top three consumer complaints on domestic platforms, though the report did not break out image duplication specifically from other forms of misrepresentation.

What Residents Are Doing, and What They Want

Community responses vary. A tenant advocacy network operating out of a co-working space on Dien Bien Phu street in Binh Thanh District has begun hosting monthly workshops on digital literacy, including how to watermark rental photographs before uploading and how to file takedown requests with platforms. Attendance at the July session, scheduled for July 19, is already capped at 40 people.

Larger landlord associations have pushed property platforms, including Batdongsan.com.vn and Nha Tot, to implement automated duplicate-detection tools, similar to hash-matching systems used by major international platforms. Both companies have acknowledged the issue in general terms on their support pages but have not publicly committed to a timeline for new detection features.

For small vendors in Ben Thanh Market's surrounding street stalls and the adjacent An Dong Plaza retail floors, the ask is simpler and more urgent: a dedicated, Vietnamese-language hotline at the Department of Industry and Trade's Ho Chi Minh City office that handles image theft complaints without requiring a lawyer or a formal written petition. Several traders said the current complaint pathway, which runs through the city's e-government portal at dichvucong.hochiminhcity.gov.vn, involves document requirements they find difficult to complete without professional help.

Until platforms invest in automated detection and authorities streamline the reporting process, residents say the burden falls on individuals, on landlords running reverse searches at midnight, and market vendors hand-stamping watermarks onto every product shot before it goes online.