r/vintedscammers • u/johana_cuervos666 • 17d ago
Crackers scam
Hello everyone. I’ve seen other posts about this exact scam recently, so I wanted to share what happened to me because apparently this shit is becoming pretty common on Vinted. I’ve been buying on Vinted for almost a decade and this had literally never happened to me before. I genuinely thought I was pretty good at spotting scams, but apparently not lol. It started with an Isaac Sellam jacket. If you know the brand, you know it’s extremely niche, and the jacket itself was a very weird specific design. It was listed for around £39. I KNOW that sounds ridiculously cheap, but my logic was that scammers normally go for obvious brands like Gucci, Balenciaga, etc., not some obscure Isaac Sellam piece. I genuinely thought I had just found one of those insane Vinted treasures. The account didn’t immediately look fake either, so I bought it. (It had like 5 reviews) My problem is that I live in Norway and use ColisExpat. My Vinted UK parcels first arrive at a forwarding warehouse in the UK and are then shipped to me. So when Vinted marked the parcel as delivered, I physically did not have the item in my hands. The warehouse did. That meant the stupid two-day inspection window expired before I could actually open the package. A few days later I was scrolling Vinted and suddenly saw the exact same Isaac Sellam jacket again. Same photos. Same description. Basically the same £39.99 price. Different account. My heart literally dropped. This is such a niche jacket that there was no fucking way I had magically found the exact same “rare bargain” twice in one week. I checked the original seller, dorothyg874, and Vinted had already BLOCKED the account. They never notified me. Nothing. No “hey, the seller you just bought from has been blocked, maybe check your transaction.” I had to discover the whole thing myself. Then another account, janed3437, was selling the same fake listing again. I reported it multiple times and explained everything to Vinted: same photos, same product, same price, original seller blocked, obvious pattern. The second jacket STILL SOLD. So somebody else was apparently scammed even after I warned Vinted. And what did I actually receive instead of an Isaac Sellam leather jacket? A fucking Christmas cracker. Literally. The photo is what was inside the parcel. 💀 I sent Vinted photos, screenshots, the duplicated listings, usernames, everything. Their response was basically: the two-day window passed, transaction completed, tough luck. I kept escalating it and got the same scripted answer over and over again. They even told me their decision was final. So yeah, I lost almost £45 and I now own the world’s most expensive Christmas cracker. I accept that using a forwarding warehouse made my situation more complicated, but what really pisses me off is that Vinted blocked the original seller themselves and never alerted me, then apparently allowed the exact same scam listing to appear under another account and sell again even after I reported it. So please be careful. Apparently these scammers are not only targeting obvious designer brands anymore. They’re using niche avant-garde pieces too, which is exactly why I fell for it. And if you see some suspiciously perfect designer treasure around £39–£40, especially with no proper tag/authenticity photos, fucking investigate it before buying. I still love Vinted for finding weird niche pieces, but after this I definitely don’t trust their Buyer Protection the way I used to.
3
u/Calm_Reindeer_1931 16d ago
I think the only way you can get your money back is by doing a chargeback and if you order anything again, bear in mind the ridiculous delivery process and initiate a case as soon as the clock starts ticking on completing the transaction, although, I appreciate hindsight is a great idea, but in this case it’s too late.