How Fake Shops Use Vinted to Lure Online Shoppers Into Costly Traps

It is a Thursday evening, and I am looking for a watch. A used vintage watch, a piece of steel that looks more expensive in the photo than the price suggests. I type “buy used vintage watch” into Google, scroll past the ads, and one of the results leads me to a product page on the secondhand marketplace Vinted.

And there it hangs. Photo one: the dial, sharp, well-lit. Photo two: the box, the certificate, even the receipt, slightly cropped. And below that, a number that makes me pause for a moment: 2,500 Euro.

I know the market. This watch costs at least 4,000 Euro used everywhere else—on the usual platforms, at the dealer around the corner. Likely more. 2,500 isn’t even a bargain anymore; it is a break in the market’s logic. My gut says: stay away. My curiosity says: write to him.

Lured to the Fake Shop

The seller—a profile without verification and without reviews—responds quickly, friendly, and strikingly professional for a supposed private sale.

The watch is still available, they say, but the order should not go through Vinted. Instead, they refer me to their own shop with its own website—complete with a logo and a Terms and Conditions tab—and suggest payment via advance bank transfer. As an additional incentive for ordering directly, a discount code is promised: a twenty percent reduction, bringing the price down to 2,000 Euro.

When I ask why the regular “Buy” button shouldn’t be used, they argue the Vinted Buyer Protection fee; a direct payment would be more advantageous for both sides. It is precisely this point that reveals the scam. What is presented as a bothersome surcharge is actually the only instrument that protects buyers from losing their money.

What Vinted Buyer Protection provides

Buyer Protection is not a rip-off; it is insurance—and an escrow system. When you pay on Vinted using the “Buy” button, you pay a fee of five percent of the item price plus 70 cents. In return, the purchase amount does not go to the seller, but to an escrow account. Vinted holds it and only releases it once the order has arrived and the buyer confirms that everything is in order.

If the goods arrive damaged, do not arrive at all, or are significantly different from the description—such as a counterfeit instead of the original—a refund can be requested within two days of delivery. Support steps in, and the money flows back. The seller does not see the money until then.

This explains the business model of the “decoy”: with an advance transfer to an external site, there is no escrow account, no deadline, no support, and no way back. The money is gone the second the transfer is initiated—the goods never arrive. The alleged discount is the bait used to lure you out of safe harbor. Every Euro saved on the Vinted fee is a Euro that is subsequently lost entirely.

Vinted reacts, but does not delete the dealer

After I reported that something presumably fraudulent was happening, Vinted did not react immediately. In a self-test, it became clear: an initial report of the seller’s profile initially had no visible consequence. The profile remains online, and the listing remains online. It was only upon the second report that a reaction followed: confirmation that the case was being investigated and that measures had already been initiated. Nevertheless, the dealer has not been deleted to date.

This is not unique to Vinted, but rather the structural dilemma of every platform: scammers often act faster than moderation teams. In its current campaign, the British Intellectual Property Office (IPO) describes this exact mechanism using a real case—a buyer received fake designer sandals, and before the platform could investigate the case, the seller had deleted their profile and disappeared with the money. Those who wait for the platform to react have usually already lost. Protection must kick in earlier—with the buyer themselves.

How to unmask a fake shop

The verification process that used to take hours can now be done in minutes. An European AI research agent like eustella can be used specifically for this purpose: instead of clicking through a dozen tabs yourself, you hand the agent the shop link with the task of checking the site.

eustella then researches the web in real-time, searches review portals and forums for the shop name, checks combinations like “Shop Name + scam” or “+ fake,” determines the age of the domain, and verifies whether a complete, authentic legal notice exists. Through the Geizhals price database integrated into eustella, the realistic market price can also be cross-checked—making an offer that is thousands of euros too low immediately stand out. Because all processing takes place on European infrastructure, your own search data remains within the EU.

However, AI does not replace common sense. The British Intellectual Property Office, together with Vinted, has published a checklist that secondhand buyers should internalize. Summarized freely:

• Check the seller profile: Are there genuine, positive reviews from previous buyers, a history of successful sales, and consistent offers—or an account that appeared out of nowhere yesterday?
• Look closely at photos: Do labels, tags, and size specifications match what would be expected from a genuine brand? Do the photos and description match?
• Watch for quality signals: For expensive pieces, check the stitching, material, logo placement, and workmanship. Typical markers of counterfeits are spelling errors on labels, crooked stitching, cheap material, and poorly reproduced logos.
• When in doubt, ask: Request additional photos or proof before purchasing.
• Always pay through the platform: Never use direct bank transfers to the seller; instead, use the platform’s own buyer protection and verification tools.
• Trust your price intuition: Genuine designer pieces are practically never sold at suspiciously low prices.

IPO figures reinforce how widespread the problem is: one in four secondhand buyers unknowingly purchased a counterfeit last year, and one in three does not check the authenticity before purchasing at all.

What to do if it has already happened

If you have fallen victim to a counterfeit or a fake shop, you should first open a dispute via the platform’s buyer protection and complaint system—provided the payment was made through the platform. If it was a bank transfer to an external shop, the next steps are going to the bank (attempting a chargeback) and to the police (filing a report for fraud). In Austria, Watchlist Internet is the central contact point for reporting suspicious shops and cross-referencing them with lists of known fake shops.

The Vinted fee of five percent plus 70 cents is therefore not a nuisance, but insurance in online commerce. Clicking from Vinted to external shops to buy supposedly cheaper items can ultimately end up being much more expensive.