Amid the unrest that swept across France this week, more than 3,000 retail locations were damaged or looted, Commerce Minister Serge Papin has said. High-end boutiques in Paris’s central Les Halles commercial district, including flagship outlets for Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and The North Face, were among the hardest hit. Now a report has claimed that just hours after storefronts were ransacked, suspicious listings featuring designer handbags, high-end skincare sets and luxury cosmetics began surfacing across leading digital marketplaces, triggering alarm over the mass online fencing of stolen merchandise.
Secondhand marketplace Vinted confirmed it has enacted emergency safeguards to suppress fraudulent product drops. Faced with a rapid influx of suspected stolen goods, Papin and digital minister Anne Le Hénanff intervened, convening an urgent virtual conference with top executives from Vinted, French secondhand platform Leboncoin, Amazon, eBay, Meta and TikTok to demand the swift removal of all illicit listings.
Under French criminal law, possessing, handling, or selling stolen goods carries severe penalties: up to five years in prison and fines reaching €375,000 ($420,000).
We are actively collaborating with law enforcement and the French authorities, and we continually adapt our processes to detect and counter emerging risks and malicious behaviour,” a Vinted spokesperson told Fortune. A Vinted spokesperson previously told trade publication RetailDetail that the platform detected a “clear spike in listings for luxury items” that rarely ever circulate in such high concentrations. For criminal operators, high-end cosmetics, luxury accessories, fragrances and portable electronics represent prime targets: they are compact, simple to photograph, command immediate consumer demand and can be liquidated quickly, according to the report. “Looted items are often sold quickly, in bulk and below market price, and the proceeds move through payment accounts that are themselves a fraud problem,” explained Serpil Hall, strategic advisor at Datos Insights specialising in financial crime.
“The sale of stolen goods, or soliciting them, is strictly prohibited on Vinted, and we have zero tolerance for it. The platform noted that the volume of designer merchandise appeared abnormal almost immediately. E-commerce platform eBay also reaffirmed its ban on stolen merchandise, emphasising that it deploys algorithmic filters and specialised human investigative units to detect suspect merchant accounts and coordinate with law enforcement. Addressing the unrest, French President Emmanuel Macron issued a warning that authorities would identify and prosecute all looters. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.