What you see is (not) what you get: genAI-powered scams on Vinted

Consumers’ growing awareness of fast fashion’s impact on the environment, along with a rise in cost of living, have led to a skyrocketing demand for secondhand clothing in recent years. And with technology powering secondhand marketplaces, buying and selling secondhand clothing online has never been easier.

One secondhand marketplace that has seen a recent boom in popularity is Vinted. Founded in Lithuania in 2008, Vinted now operates in more than 20 countries, most of them in Europe. Vinted prides itself on promoting sustainability and care for the climate—on its About page, the company states that its mission is “to make second-hand first choice”, and that “second-hand is better than new for the climate”.

But as a platform’s user base grows, so do the number of bad actors on it. Recent social media posts on Reddit and Facebook suggest that some users are flooding Vinted with genAI images, deceiving buyers into believing that the images are of vintage or secondhand items, when the clothes actually come from fast fashion giants like Shein and Temu. Science Feedback takes a closer look at this phenomenon.

Suspicious accounts

Simply by scrolling through the “Recommended for you” feed—the default landing page after login—on Vinted, Science Feedback was able to find a few accounts that posted listings of clothes using images with unusual characteristics. Vinted’s algorithm appeared to pick up on our engagement with these listings (solely through viewing them) and fed us more of such listings. We eventually found a total of 16 accounts that uploaded such listings. All accounts except for one indicated a location in France.

The images we found stood out from other listings for various reasons. For instance, they exhibited a certain “flatness” and uniformity, unlike most images uploaded to secondhand marketplaces. The latter, often taken with a phone camera, commonly exhibits clear differences in light, texture, and dimension in different parts of the image. They also tended to exhibit a uniformity in aesthetics, notably related to color shade and tone, as well as setting (e.g. photos commonly taken in a bedroom).

In some instances, anomalies can also be observed in these images. For example, some images are depicted as photos taken of a mirror image. But the Apple logo on the phone in some of these images isn’t horizontally flipped, as it should be if we were looking at a genuine photo of a mirror image (see below).

Raising more questions is the fact that at least four accounts provided very similar profile information, in that they claimed to be run by a brother and sister. The motive for this is unclear, but we hypothesize that this provides a cover story for accounts that sell clothes for both men and women.

A few accounts received more than one hundred user reviews. While reviews can be left for both buyers and sellers on Vinted, we found that the language in these reviews were generally representative of buyers. This suggests that these accounts engaged primarily in selling rather than buying, therefore review numbers could serve as a gauge for how many users were affected by these accounts.

Attractive images conceal red flags

The highly aestheticized images are eye-catching and lend the clothes an appearance of high quality. However, a reverse image search on a sample of the clothes we found showed that the clothes bore a strong resemblance to items sold on the websites of fast fashion giants Shein and Temu (see examples below).

We also used a tool from Hive Moderation to detect AI-generated content, and found that several images used in listings were flagged as likely to contain AI-generated content.

Caveat about AI detection tools

There’s currently no tool that can identify an AI-generated image with 100% accuracy. False positives, in which a real image is mistaken for an AI-generated image, can occur. False negatives, in which an AI-generated image is mistaken for a real image, can also occur. Ideally, these detection tools should be combined with other information, before drawing conclusions about an entity’s online activity.

Finally, some buyers’ reviews mentioned that the clothes they purchased arrived with no labels, suggesting that the account that sold the clothes actively sought to hide the item’s origin: a hint that the user behind the account wanted to conceal their mode of operation from buyers.

We can infer what motivates these accounts from the price of the items sold on Vinted: these were about double the price of the corresponding item sold on the Shein or Temu website, or even more. To wit, the profit margin from these sales can be significant.

Our observations suggest that the accounts aren’t selling secondhand items, but engaging in dropshipping. This is a business model in which a seller doesn’t stock the products being sold, but orders them from a manufacturer, commonly located in China, and ships it to the buyer. Dropshipping isn’t always a scam, but it is commonly employed in online scams that convince buyers to pay an inflated price for the product through deceptive advertising suggesting that the product is high-quality.

Exactly how lucrative are such operations? We might be able to take a hint from the fact that services now exist that make running dropshipping accounts even easier. For example, we found a website named Vintylook that offers to help Vinted sellers boost sales with the help of AI. Notably, it offered to turn “product photos into worn photos with one click to sell faster”. Whois information suggests that the website is based in France, like most of the Vinted accounts we found.

Some of the sample images shown on its website resemble those we found on Vinted. However, the Vinted accounts we found do not disclose the fact that they use genAI images in their listings nor the method they use to produce their images. Therefore, we cannot establish that the genAI images we found on Vinted were derived from Vintylook. We also note that Vintylook does not explicitly promote its services to dropshippers nor is dropshipping mentioned on its website. But it is easy to see how such a service can be exploited by dropshippers on Vinted.

buyer’s remorse

While some might argue that there’s no issue with using genAI to create a model of someone wearing clothes, several buyers’ reviews illustrate the problems with this approach, namely that the genAI images do not accurately depict how a piece of clothing actually looks and fits. These reviews noted that the item they received didn’t correspond in various ways to the garment shown in the seller’s photos. Among the differences noted were the quality of fabric, as well as the details, cut, and fit of the garment.

Potential gaps in platform rules and moderation

We didn’t find an explicit prohibition of genAI image use in item listings in Vinted’s Catalogue Rules. But Vinted does specify that item photos “have to be taken by you with the purpose of using the photos on Vinted”, perhaps an implicit indication that genAI images aren’t allowed on the platform.

That said, there’s currently no option to flag a listing for using genAI images. Perhaps the clearer path to recourse is reporting these listings for inaccurately describing items, an option available to users when reporting a listing.

We reported a few of these listings, but moderation outcomes were inconsistent. After reporting, we found that only one item had been “hidden”, a measure Vinted sometimes takes against content that infringes its Catalogue. Nevertheless, the item was inexplicably unhidden later and it was eventually purchased by another user.

Another item we reported didn’t have any visible action taken against it. It was sold two days later.

Vinted does have a clear policy governing the authenticity of products sold on its platform, offering a service called Item Verification to combat counterfeit luxury products. But it appears that the platform has some catching up to do when it comes to tackling inauthentic behavior from users.

We reached out to Vinted’s press office for comment, providing the list of the 16 accounts we found to exhibit signs of genAI listings and dropshipping. Vinted didn’t respond. At the time of this review’s publication, all accounts continue to be present on the platform and most are still selling clothes.

Caveat emptor

Selling clothing from fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu isn’t in itself against Vinted’s rules, and users are free to purchase them if they choose to. However, these dropshipping accounts mislead users for the sake of financial gain: they fail to correctly disclose the origin of the clothes they sell and inflate the prices of clothes that could have been bought elsewhere for a much lower price.

Further compounding the deception, these accounts use attractive genAI images to lure buyers, who later find that the images didn’t accurately reflect the quality of the garment.

There’s no question that these accounts aren’t intended to operate on Vinted: the rules make it clear that the platform is intended for secondhand trade and not the mass sale of new garments. Furthermore, the environmental harms of fast fashion are clearly at odds with Vinted’s stated values of sustainability and care for the climate. However, in the absence of better moderation and enforcement, it is likely that these accounts will continue to persist, and even grow, if nothing is done to effectively curb their behaviour.

In the meantime, it will be up to consumers to take steps to protect themselves and the community they’re a part of. As we showed above, this is fairly easy to do as a simple reverse image search will suffice. And user reporting of suspicious listings could also help Vinted catch problematic accounts. It remains to be seen if and how Vinted will evolve its policy to tackle genAI listings on its platform.