How can I tell if a furniture advert is fake?

Ask for a live video call on the actual suite - not a recorded clip and not more pictures, but a call, right now, while somebody walks around it, tips it over and works the mechanism. That is the proof, because it is the one thing a seller with no furniture cannot produce. Photographs are not evidence: they can be taken from a real manufacturer elsewhere, and they can now be generated to order, so a reverse image search catches the stolen ones but cannot catch a picture that was never taken at all. Also check that there is a street address you can look up on a map, a telephone a person answers, and a registered company name that matches the bank account you are asked to pay into.

How much should a genuine leather recliner suite cost in South Africa?

Compare published prices rather than looking for a single figure. A three-piece recliner suite carries costs nobody can remove: covering for six seats and every outside panel, timber for three frames, five reclining mechanisms, foam, springs, labour and the delivery of a couple of hundred kilograms. A seller can cut out the middleman, the showroom rent and the retail markup, but not the materials. Glyde-X sells its Cordoba three-piece suite at R19 799 in air leather, which is a man-made covering, and R49 999 in top grain genuine leather on every panel. When one advert sits thousands below every other seller describing the same thing, ask which word in that description is not true: is it hide or a man-made covering, is it leather all round or only where you touch it, are all five seats recliners, is it new, and is there a suite at all. Often one of those answers is simply no and the price is perfectly honest. The warning sign is a low price wearing the description of a higher one.

Why are fake furniture adverts so cheap?

The low price is the mechanism, not a bargain. A three-piece recliner suite has costs that cannot be removed: covering for six seats and all outside panels, timber for three frames, five reclining mechanisms, high-density foam, springs, labour and the delivery of a couple of hundred kilograms. A seller can cut out the middleman, the showroom rent and the retail markup, but not the materials. In one South African case a fraudulent website impersonating a well-known retailer advertised couches that genuinely sell for more than R22 000 at a small fraction of that, and the discount is what stopped people checking anything else. The dangerous number is not the absurd one: a R22 000 couch advertised at R1 400 makes people suspicious, while the same couch at R7 000 does not - low enough to feel like a find, high enough to be believed. Be wary too of the same suite at two prices: a shop floor price of R19 999 against an online advert at R8 999 is a hook, not a saving.

What should I ask about a furniture warranty before I buy?

Ask two questions, neither of which is printed on the warranty itself. First, who honours it: the shop that sold it to you, an importer, or the people who actually built the furniture. Every extra party between you and the factory is another place the claim can be handed on. Second, who pays for what, and what is excluded: if a mechanism fails inside the warranty, who comes out, who pays for the part, and who pays to move a two-hundred-kilogram suite there and back. A seller who has honoured a claim before answers immediately, because they have done it. A seller who cannot answer both has handed you a piece of paper, not a warranty - one buyer was sold a suite with a five-year warranty, had a mechanism fail inside the first year, and was told it was normal wear and tear. The furniture was real and the warranty was not.

Is it safe to pay for furniture by EFT?

An EFT is final. Once the money has left your account there is no chargeback and no reversal, and the South African Reserve Bank has warned that paying by EFT can mean giving up your rights of recourse if the seller does not deliver. A card payment is different and can be disputed through your bank. This does not make every EFT-only seller fraudulent - many small honest businesses use EFT because card fees are a real cost - so the question worth asking is not whether a seller takes EFT but whose account the money is going into. Read the account name your banking app shows you before you confirm. A real trading business is paid into an account in its registered company name, matching the business you think you are buying from. Money asked for in a personal name, or in a company name with nothing to do with the shop, is the clearest warning there is, and it appears at the last moment when the buyer is committed and not looking.

What should I do if I have already paid a furniture scammer in South Africa?

Move the same day. Phone your bank fraud line immediately, before anything else, because recovery depends on the money still sitting in the receiving account. Then lay a charge at any police station and get a CAS number, with an affidavit setting out who you paid and what you were promised, asking for it to be referred to the cybercrime division - SAPS Crime Stop is 08600 10111. Complain to the National Consumer Commission, which now accepts complaints online. If your bank handles it badly, the National Financial Ombud is free on 0860 800 900.

What can a genuine furniture seller do that a fake one cannot?

Show you the furniture in any way you ask. A genuine seller can walk around the suite on a live video call while you watch, let you visit and sit on it, put you on the phone to the people who built it, and show you the back panel, the underside and the frame. Somebody working from downloaded photographs can only ever send you more photographs, so ask for the thing that requires the furniture to actually exist.

How do I do a reverse image search on a furniture advert?

On a phone, press and hold the picture in the advert, save it, open Google, tap the camera icon in the search box and choose the saved picture. On a computer, right-click the picture, copy the image address, go to images.google.com, click the camera and paste it. You are looking for the same photograph on a furniture shop in another country, a stock photography site or a manufacturer catalogue. Check two or three pictures rather than just one. It is worth doing because it catches the many adverts built on stolen pictures, but it cannot catch a picture that was generated rather than taken, so a clean result is not a clean bill of health. For that, ask for a live video call on the actual furniture.

How to Spot a Fake Furniture Ad

Every few months somebody in South Africa pays for a lounge suite that does not exist. Not a shabby one, not a late one — one that was never there at all. The advert looked ordinary, the photographs looked professional, the price looked like a stroke of luck, and the money went across by EFT and did not come back.

This page explains how those adverts are built, the checks that catch almost all of them in about five minutes, and what to do if it has already happened to you. We build and sell recliner suites, so read it with that in mind — but nothing below is about any particular seller, and every check works on us as well as on anybody else.

The short version

Photographs prove nothing any more. They can be stolen from a real manufacturer, and they can now be generated from nothing at all. A reverse image search catches the stolen ones in under a minute and is well worth doing — but no photograph is evidence.
The live video call is the proof. Not a video, a call — somebody walking around the actual suite while you watch. It is the one thing a seller without furniture cannot produce, and the one thing they will always find a reason to avoid.
A price far below everybody else is the hook, not a bargain. When one advert is thousands under every other seller for the same description, the low price is what stops people checking anything else. The useful question is which word in that description is not true.
The warranty can be the fiction even when the furniture is real. Ask who honours it, what it actually covers, and who pays to move a two-hundred-kilogram suite if something fails.
How they want to be paid matters. An EFT is final — there is no chargeback. A card payment can be disputed. The Reserve Bank has warned South Africans about exactly this.
A real seller has somewhere you can stand. A street address you can drive to, a person who answers a telephone, and a registered company name that matches the bank account you are asked to pay.
If it has already happened: your bank’s fraud line first, then a police case number the same day. Speed is the only thing that helps.

The photographs
The price
A real suite, a false promise
How they want to be paid
Eight checks in five minutes
What a fake cannot do
If it has already happened
How to check us

The photographs are where it falls apart

A fake furniture advert almost never contains a photograph of furniture the seller owns. It cannot — there is nothing to photograph. So the pictures are taken from somewhere else, usually from a real manufacturer on the other side of the world who will never know.

In one South African case that the National Consumer Commission publicly warned about, a furniture operation advertised on Facebook and Instagram using photographs lifted from suppliers in Colombia and Canada, found on Pinterest and Instagram. Customers paid between R10 000 and R1.2 million each. Nothing was ever delivered. The photographs were the only part of the business that was real, and they belonged to somebody else.

It has happened to us

A Facebook page copied our photographs and used them to advertise its own products. The part worth telling you is what happened next: we had to prove to Meta that we were the legitimate business and they were not. The pictures were ours, the furniture in them was ours, and the burden of proof still sat with us.

Two things follow from that, and both matter to you more than they matter to us. The photographs in an advert prove nothing whatsoever about who is behind it. And when pictures are stolen, the business they were stolen from usually finds out late and can do very little quickly — so nobody is policing this on your behalf. The checking is yours, and it is not hard.

How to check a photograph, in under a minute

This is called a reverse image search. You are asking the internet: where else does this picture appear?

On a phone: press and hold the picture in the advert, save it, then open Google, tap the little camera in the search box, and choose the saved picture.
On a computer: right-click the picture, copy the image address, then go to images.google.com, click the camera, and paste it.

What you are looking for is the same picture on a furniture shop in another country, on a stock photography site, or on a manufacturer’s catalogue page. If it turns up in three countries under three names, you have your answer. Do it for two or three pictures, not just one.

A warning about the advice above, and about every other page that gives it. A reverse image search finds a picture that was taken from somewhere else. It cannot find a picture that was never taken at all — and photographs can now be generated to order. The room, the light, the creases in the leather, a plug socket on the wall: all of it can be produced in seconds, to any brief, and it will match nothing anywhere because it never existed before.

So the old advice — judge a seller by whether the photographs look consistent, or lived-in, or professional — no longer works, and anybody still giving it is behind. Run the reverse image search, because it still catches the lazy ones. Just do not treat any photograph as evidence.

What cannot be generated is the suite in front of a camera, right now, while you are watching. Ask for a live video call on the actual furniture. Not a recorded clip, not more pictures — a call. Ask them to walk round it, tip it over, show you the back panel and work the mechanism. That is the proof, and it is the only part of this that a seller with no furniture can never produce.

The price

“If it looks too good to be true, it probably is” is advice that helps nobody, because it never tells you what to do with the price actually in front of you. Here is the more useful version, from the manufacturing side of it.

A three-piece suite with five reclining seats carries costs that nobody can take out of it: covering for six seats and every outside panel, timber for three frames, five reclining mechanisms, foam, springs, the labour to cut, sew and assemble it, and the delivery of something that weighs a couple of hundred kilograms. A seller can cut out the middleman, the showroom rent and the retail markup — that is exactly what we do, and it is why our prices sit where they do. Nobody can cut out the materials.

Which is why our own prices are published, in full, and are not negotiable. You are entitled to hold any seller to the same standard: a price you can see, for a description you can check.

What we charge, published and not negotiable	Price
Cordoba three-piece suite, air leather (man-made covering)	R19 799
Cordoba three-piece suite, top grain genuine leather on every panel	R49 999

So when a full leather recliner suite is advertised at R12 000 — thousands below every other seller describing the same thing — the useful move is not to ask why it is so cheap. It is to ask which of those words is not true:

Is it genuine leather — or a man-made covering with a name that sounds like leather?
Is it leather all round, or only on the parts you touch?
Are all five of those seats actually recliners?
Is it new?
Is there a suite at all?

Very often one of those answers is simply no, and the price is perfectly honest. Our air leather suite is R19 799 and the covering is man-made — it says so on every product page, and that is exactly why it costs what it costs. A lower price is not the problem. A lower price wearing the description of a higher one is the problem.

The discount is the bait. In another South African case, a website impersonating a well-known furniture retailer advertised couches that genuinely sell for more than R22 000 at a small fraction of that. The discount was not a mistake or a clearance sale. It was the entire mechanism — it is what stopped people checking anything else.

And the dangerous number is not the silly one. A R22 000 couch advertised at R1 400 makes people suspicious. The same couch at R7 000 does not — it is low enough to feel like a find and high enough to be believed, and that is the advert that gets paid. A discount does not have to be absurd to be the hook. It only has to be big enough to stop you looking at anything else.

Watch for the same suite at two prices. If something sits on a shop floor at R19 999 and the identical thing is advertised online at R8 999, that gap is not a saving somebody has generously passed on to you. It is the hook.

If the covering is what you are weighing up rather than the seller, our leather buyer’s guide explains what the words on the label actually mean.

The other version: a real suite, and a promise that is not

Not everything that costs you money is a fake advert. The quieter version is a suite that genuinely arrives, sold alongside a promise that never existed.

One buyer bought a lounge suite from a reseller with a five-year warranty attached to the sale. A mechanism failed inside the first year. The seller called it normal wear and tear and did not honour it. The furniture was real. The warranty was the fiction, and it was worth exactly nothing at the moment it was needed.

A warranty is only as good as the answer to two questions, and neither of them is printed on it:

Who honours it? The shop that sold it to you, an importer, or the people who actually built it? Every extra party between you and the factory is another place the claim can be handed on.
Who pays for what, and what is excluded? If a mechanism fails inside the warranty, who comes out, who pays for the part, and who pays to move a two-hundred-kilogram suite there and back. Ask it in those words and listen to how specific the answer is. A seller who has honoured a claim before answers immediately, because they have done it.

A seller who cannot answer both has handed you a piece of paper, not a warranty. This is worth as much of your attention as the price is, because it is the part that only shows up long after the money has gone.

How they want to be paid

This is the part most people do not know until it is too late, and it is the most important thing on this page.

An EFT is final. Once the money has left your account there is no chargeback and no reversal. The South African Reserve Bank has warned consumers about this directly: paying by EFT can mean giving up your rights of recourse if the seller does not deliver. A card payment is different — a card transaction can be disputed through your bank.

That is why an advert that will take payment one way only, with no card option and no established payment provider, is worth a second look. It is not proof of anything on its own. Plenty of small, honest businesses run on EFT because card fees are real money to them.

One buyer paid R4 999 for a chair advertised on TikTok. After the money went across there was silence, and then they were blocked. No card to dispute, no company to telephone, no address to drive to — the whole relationship had lived inside an app, and it ended the moment the seller tapped a button.

So the question worth asking is not “is this seller taking EFT?” — a great many honest ones do. It is whose account is the money going into. That is a check anybody can run in the ten seconds before they confirm a payment, and it is the one that separates a real business from an operation.

Check the account name. Every time, with every seller, including us.

Your banking app shows you the name on the account before you confirm the payment. A real trading business is paid into an account in its registered company name, and that name matches the business you think you are buying from. Money asked for in a personal name, or in a company name that has nothing to do with the shop, is the single clearest warning on this page — and it appears at the last possible moment, when the buyer is committed and not looking.

Ours, so you can check it rather than take our word for it. Our banking details go out on the order confirmation in the name Glyde X (Pty) Ltd — never a personal name, never a different one. Glyde X (Pty) Ltd is a registered South African company, registration number 2025/593713/07, published on this site as the law requires and checkable against the CIPC register by anybody who wants to. If the account name your bank shows you is not our company name, stop and telephone us before you send a cent.

Our checkout is EFT only at the moment, and card payment is something we intend to add rather than something we can promise you today. Until then the checking has to happen before you pay rather than after — which is a fair thing to ask of us, and the rest of this page is how you do it.

Eight checks, about five minutes

None of these needs any expertise, and all of them are fair to run on any seller.

Reverse image search two or three of the photographs. As above. It catches the ones using stolen pictures, which is a great many of them — but remember it cannot catch a picture that was generated rather than taken, so a clean result is not a clean bill of health.
Look up the address on a map. Not a suburb, not a PO box — a street address. Then look at it. Satellite view of a house in a cul-de-sac is a different business from a factory.
Phone the number and speak to a person. An operation that exists only in a chat window is an operation that can close the window.
Check how old the website and the social pages are. A furniture business that appeared six weeks ago, with a full catalogue and heavy advertising, is worth more scrutiny than one with years of ordinary posts behind it.
Read the reviews for detail, not for stars. Real reviews mention a delivery date, a driver’s name, a colour that looked different in daylight, a complaint that got sorted out. Twenty five-star reviews posted in one week, all the same length, are not reviews. Search the seller’s name on Google, on Hellopeter, and in the comments under their own posts. Some complaints are normal and are not a warning sign — any business that has sold enough furniture has a few, and what matters is whether anybody answered them. The thing to be wary of is a seller with no trace anywhere: no Google listing, no reviews, no history, nothing but the advert in front of you.
Ask a question only a real seller can answer. What is the frame made of? Which layer of the hide is the leather? Is it hide on the back panels too? Somebody who makes furniture answers immediately. Somebody with a stolen photograph goes quiet or changes the subject.
Ask for a live video call showing the actual suite. Not a video, a call — right now, walking around it. This is the one that cannot be faked, and it is the one a fake seller will always find a reason to avoid.
Read the account name before you confirm the payment. The last check, and the quickest. Your banking app shows you whose account it is. It should be the registered company name of the business you are buying from, not a person, not something unrelated. If it does not match, stop there.

What a fake seller structurally cannot do

The checks above work because of a simple asymmetry. Somebody who has furniture can show it to you in any way you ask. Somebody who has a folder of downloaded pictures can only ever send you more pictures.

They cannot walk around the suite on a live call while you watch
They cannot let you visit and sit on it
They cannot put you on the phone to the people who built it
They cannot show you the back panel, the underside, or the frame

So ask for the thing that requires the furniture to exist. It is the whole game.

If it has already happened to you

Move today, not next week. Recovery is about speed, and the odds fall away quickly.

Phone your bank’s fraud line immediately. Before you gather paperwork, before you argue with the seller. If the money is still sitting in the receiving account there is a chance; once it has moved on there is very little.
Lay a charge at any police station and get a CAS number. Write an affidavit setting out who you are, who you paid, what you were promised and what happened, and ask for it to be referred to the cybercrime division. That case number is what your bank, the ombud and any insurer will all ask for — without it the whole thing stalls. SAPS Crime Stop is 08600 10111, and you can also report through the MySAPS app.
Complain to the National Consumer Commission. Complaints can now be lodged online rather than on paper and in person. It will not usually get your money back, but it is how a repeat operator gets stopped, and the warnings that follow are what protect the next person.
If your bank handles you badly, escalate. The National Financial Ombud is free: 0860 800 900. Go to them after your bank has had its chance, not before.

The part nobody tells you. Where somebody used your card without your permission, the bank has a clear duty and you have a decent chance. Where you were persuaded to make the payment yourself — which is precisely what this kind of operation is built to do — recovery is a great deal harder. The bank will generally argue that the payment was authorised, and where a one-time PIN was shared it will lean on that. It is a difficult argument to shift, and it is better to know it going in than to discover it at the counter.

None of which is a reflection on anybody it has happened to. These operations are run by people doing it full time, and they are convincing because they are designed to be. It is simply why five quiet minutes of checking beforehand is worth more than any amount of effort afterwards.

How to check us

The question we are asked most often, in one form or another, is simply: are you real?

It is a completely fair question, and the answer should never be “trust us”. It should be an address you can stand in and more than a hundred reviews from people who have already done exactly what you are about to do. It would be a strange page that told you to verify every seller and then asked to be taken on trust. So:

Do these to us before you pay anything

Come to the factory. We are in Eikenhof, south of Johannesburg, and you are welcome to walk in during working hours, sit on the suites and look at the frames. Our address and hours are on the contact page.
Ask for a video call. Say which suite and which colour, and somebody will walk around the actual chair on a live call while you watch. Ask them to show you the back panel and tip it over.
Reverse image search our photographs. Genuinely, do it. They should lead back here and nowhere else.
Ask the awkward questions. What the frame is made of, which layer of the hide the leather is, what the warranty covers. The answers are already written down on every product page, so you can check whether the person answering matches what the website says.
Check the company, and check the account name. Glyde X (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2025/593713/07 — look it up. Our banking details arrive in that name and no other, so the name your banking app shows you before you confirm should be the name on this page.

We have been manufacturing lounge furniture since 1990, for most of that time under other companies’ names. We wrote this because adverts using other people’s photographs make every honest seller harder to believe, and the only useful answer to that is to tell people exactly how to tell the difference — including how to check us.

This page is general consumer information about how fraudulent adverts are constructed and what recourse exists in South Africa. It describes patterns in the trade and names no business. Where it describes what we sell, the detail is on each product page and in our warranty terms.

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How to Spot a Fake Furniture Advert