The secondhand online marketplace Vinted saw a surge in suspicious listings after widespread civil unrest and riots across France.
Protests leading to looting have resulted in over 3,000 businesses and retail shops being ransacked. Social media posts and merchant reports said luxury and beauty stores, including Sephora, Celine, Burberry and Louis Vuitton, were plundered.
According to media reports, Vinted was flooded with prestige perfumes, designer handbags and luxury accessories. The resold loot even included Pokémon cards. In an interview with the press, Vinted’s response was firm: The platform said it prohibits selling stolen items and has taken immediate action to identify and remove listings tied to the looting.
The company vowed to increase monitoring of suspicious accounts. Violators face account actions up to permanent bans. It is actively coordinating with law enforcement and French authorities to investigate and crack down on illicit listings.
This looting comes as Vinted Group experiences exceptional growth. Earlier this year, the marketplace reported a 47 percent increase in gross merchandise value to 10.8 billion euros, or $12.1 billion, and 1.1 billion, or $1.23 billion, in revenue. Driven by its mission to make second-hand the first choice worldwide, the company saw robust growth across core fashion and new categories like sports and collectibles. It also expanded successfully into Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia, along with a strategic turnaround in the German market.
To support rapid scaling, Vinted advanced its vertically integrated shipping and payment ecosystem throughout 2025, giving members access to over 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points across Europe. These transfer points likely made selling looted goods easier and more accessible.
According to GlobalData and ThredUp, the global secondhand market, including apparel, electronics, furniture, luxury goods, and collectibles, reached roughly $300 billion to $350 billion in 2025–2026 and is projected to top $393 billion by 2030, growing nearly three times faster than traditional retail.
The resale market’s rapid growth is making it the main outlet for selling stolen goods, which includes retail shrink, break-ins, in-store robbery, looted items and warehouse break-ins. Most of the crime is highly organized. The rise of organized retail crime has transformed routine shoplifting into a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar shadow economy that impacts retailers, law enforcement and consumers alike.
Rather than individual opportunistic stealing, theft syndicates deploy coordinated teams of “boosters” who clear store shelves of high-value merchandise, from designer apparel and luxury cosmetics to essentials like baby formula, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and power tools.
These stolen goods are quickly funneled through organized network aggregators, known as fences, who clean, repackage and catalog the merchandise for widespread commercial distribution.
Digital secondary channels have become the main outlet for liquidating illicit inventories, often obscuring sellers’ origins while reaching millions of buyers worldwide. Platforms such as eBay, Vinted, Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace offer illicit operators’ anonymity, high traffic and fast transactions. By listing brand-new, unopened items at steep discounts, illicit sellers blend into legitimate peer-to-peer resale ecosystems, exploit consumer demand for bargains and operate behind rotating storefront profiles, proxy accounts and untraceable shipping to evade detection.
In response to pressure from trade associations, law enforcement and major retail chains, regulatory authorities and e-commerce platforms, verification mechanisms have been tightened to dismantle illicit pipelines. Legislation like the INFORM Consumers Act requires popular online marketplaces to verify high-volume third-party sellers by collecting government IDs, tax IDs and bank account information to disrupt anonymous fencing operations.
Meanwhile, digital marketplaces are expanding anti-organized retail crime task forces, sharing data with retail loss-prevention teams and using machine learning to detect suspicious listing patterns, bulk inventory dumps and recurring seller red flags before illicit goods reach buyers.
In France, it is unclear how long the protests will last. As of Monday, WWD reported that students blocked access to the Paris museum, keeping the Louvre closed. The fallout from a weekend of protests and looting reverberated across the country as retailers and brands warned that damages could run hundreds of millions of euros.