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Lovely property for sale

Someone is attempting to sell property on ebay in Pennsylvania.. which is good and fine, except they chose to link to an image from my website that is decidedly not Pennsylvania.. I know, because it's one my photographs of the beautiful Lake Minnewaska in upstate NY.

Which probably means that the other images in the auction are also from someplace else... way to misrepresent the property to people.

Thanks to mod_rewrite, the auction is now also displaying a lovely beach front view.

Reporting it to ebay fraud is probably a good idea though (and I shall).

Edit: In case ebay takes the auction down (I did email them and if nothing else, I hold copyright to that image) I took a screenshot of the modified auction.. it's cute.

Edit^2: It appears neither ebay nor the seller care.. so thanks to some photoshopping courtesy of Steve we now have a better image.

Comments

Poor guy. They should have known better than to mess with you:-)

Nice catch, and nice show of restraint. I think I would have gone directly to Defcon 1 and redirected to Tubgirl or the Goatse guy. That joker got off easy.

The seller's also got only 1 positive feedback as a seller (the other feedback was from when he *bought* stuff). And that one bit of seller feedback was from a user who hasn't left feedback for anyone else -- and only has a positive comment from the same seller.

Keeps getting more suspicious.

We started a discussion thread at BroadbandReports:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13018232

heh the other lake images are from the official minnesota state site

The guy running the auction seems to have removed your 'photo' :(

Hey, you should be flattered! Of all the images he could have grabbed, he used one of yours. Think of it as a compliment of your photography skills! :D

What a little wanker... all of those images are from public websites. He has the balls to link to an Aussie photo and some "Island" photo at the same time... I'm shocked eBay hasn't crushed him yet.

Thankfully, no bids yet.

Oh no! Some fool actually bid on the property!

Looks like you did your job. The item was taken off of e-bay. Score one for the good guys.

I've found it helpful to exclude all images via robots.txt. IMO about 99% of all hits a site gets from images.google.com are people looking to co-opt your stuff in some way.