Photos are very important for selling a product at an online auction; that's why we will need a photo to showing to the buyer about the product being sold. I believe you will agree with my statement above. Unfortunately, nowadays there are many fraudsters with the talent to take any pictures from any online auction sites, especially from eBay. For their illegal action, the fraudsters use those pictures to ensure to their potential victim that they actually have the physical product when in fact they don't have anything. There are many of the victims have been trapped with this criminal method, just because the fraudster uses those pictures to proof the existence of the product they sell.

According to a report released by Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), fraud activities which are a Non-delivery method have the first rank in 2008 of Internet-related crimes report; it is about 32.9% from the total internet crime's activities. Many of the referred complaints were caused by anything from online auction fraud to identity theft. It's meaning; we have an indirect correlation between fraudster activities and our online auction activities, which was the fraudster took the picture from our online auction list for their action.

The question is how to prevent the illegal abuse of our digital photos through an online auction?. It's not difficult to prevent it if you read the following tips about how to protect your digital photos. Essentially you need to put the identity on each of your photo, the identity can be your online auction's user ID or your email, or both, but I will suggest to putting both on it. They are 2 options about how to put your identity to each of your photos:

1. Before taking a picture of the product with camera, you need to write your identity on the paper and place it in front of your product. Make sure the texts are readable when the camera takes the picture.
2. After taking a picture, you can edit the picture using any software of photo editor. You have to write the identity with transparency color, make the text to diagonal cross over the picture, set the opacity to low value, until it can be readable but transparency text, so that the product will be visible even the text has appeared in front of.

Also, you can use all of the above options, it will be more safe. By using the above tips to protect your photos at an online auction, you have participated to reduce and against internet fraud activities. Good luck to try!