Mumbai Cracks Down on Fake Property Photos After Years of Fraud

The Maharashtra Real Estate Regulatory Authority has confirmed it received more than 4,700 complaints in the 2025-26 financial year related to misleading property advertisements, with duplicate or misrepresented listing images accounting for nearly a third of that total. The figure marks a near-doubling from the 2,600 complaints logged in 2023-24, and it has forced a conversation that brokers on Linking Road and in the glass towers of BKC have been avoiding for years.

The timing matters because Mumbai's property market is under more scrutiny than at any point since MahaRERA was established under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act in 2017. The Dharavi redevelopment project, the single largest urban rehabilitation scheme in Asia, being executed by Adani Realty under a government concession, has put tens of thousands of resettlement units into circulation, many of them advertised digitally for the first time by small brokers who have no established photography infrastructure. Into that gap, duplicate images flooded.

A Problem Built Over a Decade of Cut-and-Paste Listings

The practice did not begin with Dharavi. Brokers working out of Andheri East, Malad West and Chembur have relied on shared photograph pools for well over a decade. A two-bedroom flat in a Kandivali housing society would be listed with photographs actually taken inside a show apartment in Thane's Ghodbunder Road corridor, sometimes hundreds of kilometres from the advertised property. When MahaRERA began its online project registration portal in 2017, developers were required to upload floor plans and unit details, but the regulation stopped short of mandating verified, geo-tagged photography. That omission became the loophole the industry quietly exploited.

The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in New Delhi flagged the photograph duplication issue in a landmark 2022 order involving a Pune developer, but the ruling's reach into Mumbai's sprawling secondary market was limited. PropTech analysts at the Navi Mumbai-based consultancy firm Credai-MCHI estimated in their March 2026 report that roughly 18 percent of active residential listings on major portals contained at least one image that appeared in another listing within the same six-month window. On some hyperlocal platforms serving areas like Kurla and Govandi, that figure climbed above 30 percent.

The damage is not abstract. Buyers, many of them first-generation homeowners using the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana subsidy, which offers interest subvention of up to 6.5 percent for loans below Rs 6 lakh, have signed agreements and paid token amounts based on photographs that bore no resemblance to the actual units. Consumer courts in Mumbai's Bandra and Dindoshi complexes have seen a surge of such cases since 2024, with settlement amounts ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 8 lakh depending on stage of purchase.

Where the Regulation Now Stands

MahaRERA issued a draft circular in April 2026 proposing that all new project registrations include geo-tagged, timestamped photographs certified by an empanelled third-party agency. The deadline for public consultation closed on June 15. The proposal would make Maharashtra the first Indian state to mandate what amounts to a photographic audit trail for real estate listings, putting it ahead of frameworks currently operating in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru's RERA equivalents.

Implementation will not be automatic or painless. The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, which manages over 95,000 tenements across Mumbai's mill land and transit camps, has its own backlog of unverified listing photographs going back to digitisation drives in 2019. Clearing that backlog before any new rule takes effect is a precondition that housing ministry officials have privately acknowledged will take at minimum eighteen months.

For buyers navigating the market right now, the practical advice from consumer advocates at the Grahak Panchayat, a Mumbai-based organisation with forty years of housing litigation experience, is straightforward: demand the MahaRERA registration number for any listed project, cross-check the registered floor plan against every photograph supplied, and visit the site before paying any amount above a Rs 5,000 refundable token. The regulation may be coming. The protection, for the moment, still has to come from the buyer.