Glossary

The words of listing fraud.

Plain definitions of the terms used across Bikoosh and in fraud reporting.

Listing cloning

Copying a genuine rental listing's photos and text to another site with changed contact details, to collect deposits fraudulently.

Advance-fee rental scam

Any scheme where a 'landlord' collects money (deposit, reservation fee, document fee) before the victim can view a property that the scammer does not control.

Perceptual hash (pHash)

A short fingerprint of an image's visual structure; near-identical images produce near-identical hashes, so lightly edited copies can be detected by comparing hashes.

Visual embedding

A neural-network representation of an image; edited copies of the same scene stay close in embedding space even when crops or filters break simpler hash matching.

Text shingle

A fixed-length word sequence (Bikoosh uses 8 words) used to detect copied descriptions: matching several shingles means text was copied, not coincidental.

Certificate Transparency (CT)

A public log of all newly-issued HTTPS certificates. Watching it reveals newly-created domains, including ones whose names match fraud patterns.

Typosquat

A domain name imitating a brand with small changes (extra hyphen, swapped letter, different ending), used to impersonate the brand.

DMCA takedown notice

A formal copyright-infringement notice sent to a site's host or registrar asking for removal of copied content; the standard first step against clones on their own domains.

Registrar abuse contact

The email address every domain registrar must operate for reporting abuse of domains they manage; discoverable via RDAP/WHOIS lookups.

Whitelisted syndication

The places a property manager legitimately publishes a listing (OTAs, channel managers, their own site). Monitoring must exclude these to avoid false alarms.

Answer engine optimization (AEO)

Structuring content so AI-powered answer engines can quote it: direct answers, structured data, honest sourcing, and machine-readable site maps.