In June, Hannah* listed her seven-year-old daughter’s pink swimming costume for sale on Vinted, hoping other parents surfing the reselling site would snap up the £۱ offer. Her inbox pinged.
“So a little girl wore this yh [yeah]?” wrote a user with a male handle.
“She did yes,” Hannah replied.
“Naked?”
After sending back a barbed “What do you think?”, Hannah swiftly blocked the user and reported the incident to Vinted. She described the exchange as “disgusting” and “disturbing”.
Her experience is just one of the many innocuous listings of children and young people’s secondhand clothes on reselling apps that are attracting unwanted sexualised comments through their direct messaging function.
The Children’s Society has warned that some young users of resale sites are increasingly being asked for indecent photos in exchange for money or gifts. Some photos of young users posted on the platforms have been AI deepfaked into nudes without their consent.
In response, ministers are considering banning under-۱۶s from platforms such as Depop, eBay and Facebook Marketplace, according to the Sunday Times, over mounting fears that their private messaging functions are the latest frontline in child exploitation. Vinted, which has a minimum age of ۱۸, would have to join the other sites in gating access with strict age verification features.
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said on Sunday that the government was “looking seriously” at expanding the under-۱۶s social media ban to include online marketplaces. It is understood the regulations were sent for cabinet signoff this week, with Nandy expected to present them to parliament in December.
Young women have posted on TikTok and Reddit about their concerning interactions with buyers. Those exchanges include asking the seller if the item will come with used underwear if they buy it, or unsolicited sexual comments about their appearance.
Lucy* started reselling her pre-loved clothes on Depop when she was ۱۵ and has been subject to many unsettling experiences. Once, she listed an item of clothing for about £۱۰ and a user requested to raise the price. “The person had changed it to £۳۰ and said: ‘If you include your pants I’ll pay more’,” she said. “That made me feel like, oh my God, awful.”
She then discovered that images of her taken when she was under the age of ۱۸, posted to advertise her clothes, had been scraped from Depop and were circulating on Reddit.
“These pictures are actually still being resurfaced on these Reddit pages, which is quite frustrating,” she said. “It would be me at ۱۷ trying to sell a bikini, and these men have screenshotted these images … It’s not just me, it’s hundreds of other girls.”
About two years ago, Lucy came across another social media platform, Discord, where she found users had stolen her old Vinted and Depop photos and manipulated them using AI to make deepfakes of her “fully nude”. She said: “It’s deplorable that people think it’s acceptable to take people’s images and make them into AI porn – I felt really, really upset.”
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Vinted says minors can only access the site under the supervision of adult account holders, while Depop says users must be aged ۱۳ or over to set up an account, and over ۱۸ to use PayPal and the Depop payment systems. However, the UK communications watchdog Ofcom has found that ۱۵% of eight to ۱۴-year-olds use Vinted each month, while another report has suggested that some children are able to bypass checks and access age-restricted online services.
Some child safety campaigners have expressed fears a sweeping social media ban could exclude children from the internet entirely. Karen Garland, the head of policy at the Marie Collins Foundation, a charity that supports victims of technology-assisted child sexual exploitation, said: “We need to make spaces for children and young people that are safer by design. And so, in some ways, extending a ban into other spaces may not be the best route overall.”
Despite her experience, Lucy is conflicted about the ban. “It’s a real shame because there are probably very young girls that maybe are from different backgrounds … that maybe really need that money.”
However, she acknowledged that there could be “extremely dangerous” consequences to selling clothes on Vinted. She said that as she was now ۲۵ and has continued to find sexualised images of herself online, the risk did not end at ۱۸.
A Vinted spokesperson said: “We have zero tolerance for harmful or explicit content and use a combination of dedicated moderation teams and detection tools to spot and remove activity that breaks our rules. When we identify inappropriate behaviour, we take action, up to a permanent ban or reporting to the relevant authorities.”
An eBay spokesperson said: “We have clear policies and safeguards to protect our community, including encouraging people to keep conversations on eBay, avoid sharing personal contact details and report any suspicious or inappropriate behaviour. Where we or our customers identify policy violations, we take appropriate action.”
Depop said: “Using someone’s images without their permission is a violation of our terms of service, which explicitly prohibits users from using or sharing another user’s content without their consent, whether on Depop or elsewhere. We take the safety of our community extremely seriously and we have robust policies, controls and processes in place to protect our users.”
*Names have been changed
