You list a barely-worn designer jacket on Vinted on a Sunday afternoon. Within minutes, a buyer messages you. They’re thrilled. They ask for your email address “so Vinted can send the payment.” Moments later, a polished email arrives — Vinted branding, your item photo, your price — asking you to click a link to confirm the sale and receive your money. Your heart jumps. This is the moment a classic vinted scam does its work, and it happens to thousands of sellers and buyers every single week.
Here’s the truth that makes this scam so cruel: Vinted never asks a seller to click an email link to receive payment. Real payments live entirely inside the Vinted app. That email — no matter how official it looks — is a fake, built to steal your banking details, your Vinted password, or both. Once criminals have those, your money follows quickly.
Vinted has grown into one of Europe’s largest secondhand marketplaces, with well over 100 million registered members buying and selling pre-loved clothes across the UK, EU, and the US. That scale is exactly why scammers camp on it. They know new sellers are eager, buyers are hunting bargains, and both groups trust the Vinted name. This guide walks you through how these frauds actually work, the red flags that give them away, and the exact steps that keep your money safe.
How the Classic Vinted Scam Playbook Works
The most common vinted scam follows a script so consistent you could set your watch by it. Understanding the choreography is half the defense, because once you’ve seen the steps, you’ll recognize them anywhere.
Step 1: The hook. The “buyer” contacts you through Vinted’s chat within minutes of your listing going live. New sellers are the favorite targets — scammers watch fresh listings the way sharks watch surfboards. The buyer is friendly, enthusiastic, and moves fast.
Step 2: The contact grab. They ask for your email address or phone number, claiming Vinted needs it to “process the payment” or “verify the sale.” Real Vinted sales never need your email or phone number. The platform already has your details. This single request is the single biggest tell in the entire scam playbook — the moment you see it, you’re almost certainly talking to a criminal.
Step 3: The fake confirmation. You receive an email or text message that looks convincingly like it’s from Vinted. Your item name, your price, the Vinted logo, professional layout. It says your item has sold and instructs you to click a link — or scan a QR code — to “confirm” the sale and receive your money. The link leads to a fake Vinted login page that harvests your credentials, or worse, a page that asks for your internet banking details or card number.
Step 4: The drain. If you type your details into that page, the scammers log into your real Vinted account or your bank within minutes. Victims have reported unauthorized transfers and drained balances before they even finished their coffee. And they never got paid for the jacket.
Real sales on Vinted work differently. When someone buys your item, you get an order confirmation inside your Vinted dashboard, and Vinted generates a shipping label for you. No email link. No QR code. No card details. If those things aren’t happening inside the app, the “sale” doesn’t exist.
The Overpayment Trick, Step by Step
The second-most common fraud targets sellers who are impatient to close a deal — which, let’s be honest, is most sellers. The buyer offers you more than your asking price. They have a reason that sounds human: they’re in a rush, it’s a gift, they really want the item. Then the mechanics get strange.
Step 1: The generous offer. Your item is listed at £40. The buyer offers £60 “because I need it urgently” and says they’ll send the extra directly via PayPal or bank transfer.
Step 2: The fake receipt. You receive what looks like a legitimate payment confirmation — often branded to resemble a PayPal or bank notification — claiming the funds are being held and will release once you show proof of postage. The email is fabricated. The money doesn’t exist.
Step 3: The pressure to ship. The buyer leans on you to post the item immediately so the funds “release.” Some even send fake courier tracking pages. If you ship before confirming payment inside Vinted’s own system, you lose both the item and the imaginary money.
This is worth repeating plainly: no real Vinted buyer needs to pay you outside Vinted, and no real buyer overpays by accident and needs you to refund the difference before shipping. The overpayment is the bait; your shipped item is the prize.
The Fake “Vinted Support” Chatbot That Emptied Revolut Accounts
Not every Vinted fraud happens in the marketplace chat. Police in the UK documented a particularly nasty variant that starts after a genuine-looking failed transaction. Officers from the North East Regional Organised Crime Unit (NEROCU) warned that nine victims in the North East of England lost a combined £2,600 to this version.
Here’s how it ran: the victim tried to retrieve funds after a failed transaction and was contacted by a fake “Vinted” chatbot. The chatbot — professional, calm, helpful-sounding — advised the victim to open a new Revolut account to resolve the issue. They were told to add money to “activate” the account so the previous amount could then be retrieved. Once the victim loaded money in, the scammers swept the Revolut account clean. Every penny.
A separate wave used fake Vinted support accounts inside the platform itself — usernames like “vinted_support” or “vinted_verify” — timed to arrive right after a new seller’s first listing. The message piggybacked on a genuine platform event so perfectly that sellers assumed it was official. The link went to a cloned Vinted site that asked for internet banking credentials.
The lesson is stark: Vinted support will never contact you asking you to open a new bank account, and will never ask you to transfer money to “activate” or “retrieve” anything. Any message that does is fraud, full stop.
Red Flags on Vinted That Should Stop You Cold
- Anyone asks for your email or phone number. Vinted handles everything in-app. The request exists only so the scammer can send you a fake payment email outside Vinted’s view.
- A “Vinted” email or text asks you to click a link or scan a QR code to receive payment. Real Vinted payments never work this way. Forward these to phishing@vinted.com and delete them.
- The buyer offers more than your asking price. Generosity from strangers is a sales tactic, not a virtue. Overpayment is one of the oldest marketplace cons in existence.
- Pressure to complete the deal off the platform. PayPal Friends and Family, bank transfer, crypto, gift cards — every one of these strips away Vinted’s Buyer Protection, which only covers in-app payments and messages.
- The buyer wants you to ship before payment is confirmed in your Vinted dashboard. No dashboard confirmation, no shipping label, no parcel. Non-negotiable.
- Prices that make no sense. A “new with tags” designer bag at 10% of retail, using stock photos from the brand’s website instead of real pictures — that’s either counterfeit or bait.
- A support account contacts you first with urgent instructions. Vinted doesn’t chase you. You chase Vinted, through the Help Centre, when you need help.
- Brand-new profile, zero reviews, urgent tone. Any one of these is fine alone. All three together should make you very careful.
Verify Before You Ship or Pay: 8 Checks
- Stay inside the app for everything. Chat, payment, shipping labels — all of it. The moment any part of the deal leaves Vinted, you’re on your own and unprotected.
- Never share your email or phone number with another user. There is no legitimate reason a buyer or seller needs it.
- Confirm sales in your dashboard, not your inbox. A real sale shows as an order inside Vinted and comes with a Vinted-generated shipping label. Email “confirmations” prove nothing.
- Inspect the sender address of any “Vinted” email. Scammers use domains that look close to vinted.com at a glance. Type vinted.com into your browser yourself instead of clicking through.
- Use the tracked shipping label Vinted gives you. If a buyer claims the parcel never arrived and you didn’t scan it properly, you lose the dispute. Photograph the packed item with the label on it before drop-off — that photo is your last line of defense.
- Check seller reviews and photos before buying. Real sellers post clear photos from multiple angles. Stock photos, blurry images, and a fresh account selling luxury goods are a bad combination.
- Pay only through Vinted’s checkout. Vinted’s Buyer Protection only applies to in-app payments and messages. PayPal Friends and Family is called that for a reason — it offers you no protection whatsoever.
- When in doubt, stop. Close the app, reopen it from a trusted source, and check whether the “official” message you received exists inside your real account. It won’t.
What to Do If You’ve Already Clicked or Shipped
First: don’t panic, but move fast. If you entered card or banking details on a fake page, call your bank immediately and freeze the card — this is the step that actually saves money, and every minute counts. If you entered your Vinted password, change it now from the real app, and change it anywhere else you reused it.
If you already shipped an item to a scammer, contact Vinted support through the Help Centre right away and report the user. Then contact your bank about the payment side. One caution from Vinted’s own help pages: talk to Vinted support before opening a chargeback with your payment provider, because opening an outside dispute first can lead to an account restriction under its terms. You still keep your right to dispute with your provider — weigh the trade-off, but talk to Vinted first.
Keep everything: screenshots of the chat, the fake email with its headers, any receipts. You’ll need them for the reports below, and evidence is what turns a complaint into an investigation.
How to Report a Vinted Scam
- Vinted: Forward phishing emails to phishing@vinted.com, and report suspicious profiles through the app’s reporting tools.
- UK: Report fraud to Action Fraud, the UK’s national fraud reporting centre.
- US: Report to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.
- Your bank: If money left your account, report the fraud to your bank or card provider immediately — they can sometimes reverse recent transfers.
The Bottom Line on Vinted Scams
Every Vinted scam runs on the same fuel: the desire to close the deal quickly. The fake payment link, the overpayment, the urgent support chatbot — each one is engineered to stop you from doing the one thing that would expose it, which is checking inside the real Vinted app. Make that check a reflex, keep every message and every payment inside the platform, and never hand a stranger your email address or your banking details. The marketplace itself is legitimate and millions of people use it safely every day. The scammers just need you to step outside its walls.
Sources
- Cleveland Police (NEROCU), “New Online Shopping Scam Warning” (May 2024) — https://www.cleveland.police.uk/news/cleveland/news/2024/may/new-online-shopping-scam-warning/
- Durham Constabulary, “Warning as new scam targets online shoppers” (2024) — https://www.durham.police.uk/news/durham/news2/2024/03.-may/warning-as-new-scam-targets-online-shoppers/
- EcomWatch, “Vinted Scammers Are Targeting New Sellers Within Minutes of Their First Listing. Here Is Exactly How It Works.” — https://ecomwatch.com/news/vinted-scammers-are-targeting-new-sellers-within-minutes-of-their-first-listing-here-is-exactly-how-it-works/
- 2-Spyware, “Vinted Scam: Fake Payment Links, QR Codes, What to Do” (updated October 2026) — http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-vinted-scam.html
- AliDropship, “Is Vinted A Scam? How To Spot Scams And Stay Safe 2026” (updated October 2026) — https://alidropship.com/is-vinted-a-scam/
- Resolver, “Common Vinted complaints and how to handle them” — https://news.resolver.co.uk/common-complaints-on-vinted-and-how-to-handle-them/
Last reviewed: October 2026
This article is for education only and is not financial or legal advice.