I love Vinted. I just wish it loved me back when I was scammed

It’s with some shame that I write yet again about online shopping, especially given that I was recently scammed.

I purchased an “Anine Bing” shirt on Vinted for a suspiciously low price and wasn’t at home to inspect the package when it arrived. Vinted gives buyers 48 hours post-delivery to raise the alarm, which can be tricky if “delivered” means left in your neighbour’s or the green bin. When I examined it, I soon saw that my stripy shirt was more Shein hate-crime than Scandinavian chic. The bold seller explained that they had name-checked the brand in the listing but “not selected it from the drop-down menu”.

I contacted Vinted. “I’ve checked the transaction details,” the reply read, but the two-day deadline had passed. I asked what happened when an item was found to be counterfeit after two days. Days later, a new reply appeared: “I do apologise. Please disregard that last message …” I was asked to send detailed photos of the counterfeit item and receipts if I had them. I was pleasantly surprised, if confused, by the receipts request.

An hour after sending the photos, I was brushing my teeth when my phone lit up with a notification preview. “I’ve checked the transaction details …” it read and my heart sank. The two-day deadline had passed.

“No! You don’t understand!” I typed, shooing my son into bed, feeling like K in Kafka’s The Trial, if K had simply been trying to return an ugly blouse. “Your …” I paused. “... colleague requested these. See above thread??” I hit send, groaning into my phone and scaring the dog.

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“I’ve checked the transaction details …”

“Conversation ended. Thank you for contacting Vinted support.”

I’m an OG second-hand shopper, with an eBay account older than some university graduates. When I was a student I learned that items beyond my budget could be found used online. I also love the goodwill of peer-to-peer shopping. In Summer 2025, when tariffs threw US post into chaos, I shipped a skirt to a Depop buyer in New York. It came back twice, costing more in postage than I earned. “It came!!!” she messaged in November, with a flourish of hearts, and I let out a little whoop on the bus.

Tariff skirts and counterfeit shirts are the outliers. Most resale transactions go off without a hitch. And for the handful that don’t there’s customer support. When Vinted closed the chat and left me holding the shirt, I felt strangely adrift with no “contact us” button in sight, not even a well-hidden one at the end of an obstacle course of help topics.

After losing money when a buyer claimed her parcel arrived empty, Catherine Warrilow started a website called Sad Vinted Faces for disgruntled users. It launched in June 2026 and has so far collected 7,000 submissions. There are sellers who say bots wrongly identified their items as counterfeit and banned them. One was flagged for art fraud on listing a “Monet” necklace, another for uploading cocktail spoons that were marked “dangerous weapons”.

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Like Warrilow, many report no recourse when a buyer falsely reports an item is damaged or missing. Buyers also feel unsupported, being asked to pay for faulty returns or engage in lengthy appeals. “AI bots”, “automated responses”, and “no human” appear in many stories. My own experience feels tame next to the user who claims their appeal denial was signed off with pawprint emojis.

Instead of charging sellers a commission, Vinted charges buyers a fee. In Ireland this is approximately 5 per cent of the item price plus 70c. Until recently this was the “buyer protection fee” and ostensibly covered customer support. It was criticised by consumer advocacy groups that felt “protection” promised more than it delivered.

In October 2025, the European Consumer Centre in the Netherlands announced it would cease handling complaints against Vinted because it could not compel the platform to reconsider decisions. Vinted’s buyer protection scheme, it pointed out, is a contractual service, not statutory consumer protection. The company sets the terms for resolving disputes.

Since October 5th, that charge is now called the “Vinted fee”. It’s a big source of revenue for the marketplace, alongside paid seller promotions such as item bumps and highlights and, potentially, interest on customer balances as it brings payments in-house through Vinted Pay.

Vinted told the Guardian that appeals are reviewed by humans. When I contacted it about buyer protection and its approach to counterfeit items, a spokesperson said Vinted remained “committed to tackling them using a combination of detection tools and human review”.

We are familiar with the platform model. On top are human exchanges that feel better than shopping from Zara, like social media once felt better than simply browsing the web. Buyers and sellers produce value. They take on risk. The platform controls the rails and takes a cut of each exchange. What might be new here is not only the risk that consumers are being exposed to, but the automation of accountability when things go wrong.

This is not just a Vinted problem. This week the European Commission opened an investigation into Booking.com, alleging the platform may have failed to prevent fraudulent listings and phishing scams aimed at consumers. It asks how much responsibility platforms have to protect users.

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Users may believe there is an adequate taskforce of humans at hand whose job it is to help and keep them safe, until they’re locked out of their account and locked into a nonsense debate at 2am. They may assume that the platform is accountable to basic consumer protection, only to find it is accountable to itself.

I love Vinted. I just wish it loved me back.