Help! My Photos Were Stolen to Scam My Guests — So Here's What I Did Next...

If you've ever posted a photograph of your accommodation online and thought "I hope the right people see this" - this episode is a timely reminder that visibility can attract the wrong kind of attention too.

On 26th August, Sarah discovered that someone had taken photographs of The Hudnalls Hideout, her luxury couples-only treehouse in the Wye Valley and used them to build a completely fake holiday accommodation website. Different brand name. Random private residential address in Gloucestershire. Convincing booking page. Real guests handing over real money for a holiday that didn't exist.

In this episode, Sarah walks through what actually happened: how the scam worked, why it's more sophisticated than simply pinching a photograph and putting it on a blog, and why the fact that your marketing is working well can make you more of a target, not less. She's candid about the moment the situation shifted from "that's annoying" to "this is actually serious" and honest about the fact that she's far from alone. This is happening to more accommodation businesses than most people realise.

She covers exactly what to do if you discover it's happened to you: what to document, who to report it to, how to handle a guest who has been affected, and what not to say. And she makes the case firmly, for why the answer isn't to become invisible. It's to make your genuine business so easy to find and so obviously credible that any imposter version doesn't stand a chance.

The episode ends with a five-point checklist and a bigger marketing lesson that applies whether you've experienced image theft or not: visibility is valuable. Your job is to make sure that when people find you, they can tell they've found the real you.

Key Takeaways

Don't assume being small means you're invisible. You don't need thousands of followers to become a target: you just need photographs or video content that a scammer thinks they can exploit. Sometimes that happens precisely because your marketing is working.Document everything the moment you discover it. Screenshots, URLs, dates, adverts, emails from affected guests: create an evidence file immediately, because fake websites can disappear fast and you'll need proof of what was there.Go upstream when reporting. Report to the website platform, the hosting company, the domain registrar, the advertising platform and search engines and where relevant, the appropriate authorities. One email is rarely enough.If a guest contacts you because they've been scamme