Here is a real-life conversation on a secondhand shopping app: a buyer of two items asks if a seller could combine postage costs. The petulant seller refuses. After a grating plea from the buyer, the seller retorts, “Fine, I’ll refund you, but I’m doing it my way.” Eventually, the buyer receives a large piece of card with a load of grubby coppers stuck to it with Sellotape. On the back it says, “Enjoy the refund!”
And there’s nothing odd about this – these sorts of exchanges between Brits on marketplace apps are so commonplace they have become part of the texture of the shopping experience. Maybe even part of the fun. But why do we communicate like this? What is happening that we can’t be remotely polite and normal? Where have our famous manners gone?
The more colourful examples warrant a popular British Instagram account called DM Drama. It was previously known as “Depop Drama,” because of the mass popularity of secondhand shopping site Depop. It has 4.2m active buyers, the majority of who are in the UK, but expanded to cover other rapidly rising apps, such as Vinted, which made a 61% growth in revenue between 2022 and 2023. Followers send in their most ridiculous conversations with scammers and abusive characters on the apps. A typical exchange starts with someone offering £2 for a Shein crop top and rapidly descends into a mocking admission that the seller’s boyfriend never loved them anyway and PS they’re a pathetic cow. One day it’s an outraged buyer receiving a busted pair of jeans held together with nothing but gaffer tape and an insult to their intelligence. The next it’s a seller pretending she’s dead and answering as her grieving husband to avoid giving a refund. It’s pandemonium, it’s insanity and it’s a whole lot of drama over a pair of denim shorts needed for a party on Saturday.
Over the past two years, 32% of buyers have been scammed – most commonly by receiving incorrect or counterfeit goods, or nothing at all – on secondhand marketplace apps. A survey of 1,300 buyers by Which? found that buyers were most likely to be scammed on Depop, where a staggering 57% reported having been scammed; on Vinted, it was 22%. Interestingly, though, fraud was not revealed to be a one-sided endeavour. Which? spoke to 1,400 sellers, too, and nearly a quarter of them reported being scammed over the same two-year period. No one and everyone is winning in this arrangement.
The sentiment on both sides is one of suspicion. In a recent screenshot of messages on DM Drama, a potential buyer messaged a seller expressing concern she’d be scammed, because they had no reviews. “What are you worried about? Please tell me,” the seller asked. “That I’ll be scammed!” she replied. “Don’t be afraid,” the seller said.
This freak phenomenon sits naturally next to the various weird relationships that people have with each other online, that have only become more intense since the pandemic. It seems that the closer we get to reaching 10 hours a day of iPhone screen time, the less we care about who sees what we say. We’re more brazen about who we speak to, how we communicate with them and why.
Take that energy into a one-on-one sphere like Depop where money changes hands and it feels normal to create these heated temporary relationships with strangers.
It’s worth noting both Depop and Vinted publish “community guidelines” on their sites, saying that users who engage in hate speech, abuse, harassment, inappropriate messages or requests will have action taken against them.
When Gina from London was having a mental health crisis in her mid-20s she made a relatably unbalanced Depop multi-purchase of a unicorn head for her wall and a pink-and-red lace bra. Her package didn’t arrive for a month, so she complained and got her money back. “The next day it arrived, but I thought, ‘Finders keepers, I’m keeping the money,’” she tells me. She posted a picture of herself in the bra on her Instagram – and the girl who sold it found the picture online. Rather than contact Gina, she reported her to Depop and they told her to return the money. “I said, ‘No, it’s a different bra I swear,’” she laughs. “I didn’t pay her back, because I was so skint and they just banned me.”
She eventually paid, but Depop still won’t let her make an account. “When I sent the money to her I sent a message saying, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t pay you back straight away, Christmas was awful for me and the kids x.’” Reader: she doesn’t have kids. The fact that we’re buying from a fellow human being rather than a corporation or small business doesn’t deter us from bad behaviour. If anything, the seller being just like us masochistically encourages us to see theft as an easy and victimless crime. (Not deterred by this, the now 30-year-old started using her friend’s Depop account to buy and sell clothes. Soon enough, when she was selling a green dress, she got into an altercation after a potential buyer called her “Kermit”.)
As the data would suggest, sellers are far from innocent when anyone with an iPhone can make a quick £30. Emma, 25, an unassuming girl-next-door type from London, started her low-level scam career young, at 16, buying from charity shops, sometimes cutting out labels and selling items as vintage for more money. “My mates would be like ‘That’s so wrong, you’re basically ripping off charities.’ But I was giving my money to a charity shop and what I do with the products after that is my business. You snooze, you lose. It sounds heartless, but that was the attitude,” she shrugs.
In the era of the side hustle and cost-of-living crisis, actions like these might have once been considered fraudulent or sneaky, but are now just an extension of entrepreneurial spirit and savvy marketing. Everyone is just trying to get the best deal – and that includes buyers who probably don’t care enough to authenticate a “vintage” branded item, if wearing it fools someone else into believing it’s real.
By the time she was at university, Emma had “quite a big” Depop presence, which was helping to fund her lifestyle. She noticed a trend for Adidas crop tops, so when she came across some fake Nike-tick logos, she had the idea to make fake Nike crop tops. After a successful stint selling these, she found some iron-on Playboy patterns, which she put on a T-shirt and uploaded as authentic vintage Playboy. “It got so many likes, so many comments. I think I put it up for £60 originally and different girls were trying to reserve it, so I got them up to £120,” she tells me.
Despite some difficult conversations, she was never caught out by people saying she was selling counterfeits. Now, not only is she off the apps as a seller, but she doesn’t use them any more as a buyer either, ironically having been put off by the rising prices and “disgusting” constant scamming. “It’s absolutely extortionate. It’ll literally be a crumpled up New Look T-shirt from 2004 for sale for £85 – and I think, why is everyone entertaining this?” she says. “But people really will do anything on there.” It’s true. When I spoke to my aunt about her recent experiences selling some unwanted clothing on Vinted, she said she was told by a buyer to ‘Go fuck herself’ – and that she’d promptly returned to the comfort of eBay.
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What’s different about these apps compared to say eBay is that they’re all about bartering – rather than bidding or buying – with people of all ages. Depop’s age limit is 12 and from the conversations you have on there, you can tell. The exchanges typically begin with an effusive “Hi hun x” in which the initiator, often the potential buyer, tries to charm the other. Quickly, this descends into insults and aggression. Perhaps there is something about the ever-present threat of being on the receiving end of a con that makes the exchanges so fiery. Are we now so distrusting of everyone, every last institution and person, that we have to be ready to both attack and defend ourselves? I think it’s as though on these apps, we see people not as a friend, nor a foe, but a secret third thing.
When I put this to Dr Ysabel Gerrard, a senior lecturer in social media, she recalls her many years spent working in retail. “You’re right that there is this third thing happening here that is different from what’s happening on social media: it’s this feminised customer service voice. Girls in particular talk in a very gendered way, socialised to think that to get what you need as a woman you have to say your pleases and thank yous and awful polite ‘Hey hun,’ ‘Hey babe,’ and an x at the end of the message,” she says. When either side has to present as customer service or as friendly for “self-protection”, then naturally the other side becomes, for want of a better word, a “Karen”, the much-memed name for demanding middle-aged women who want answers and expect service.
“For a Karen, the tiniest thing can go wrong in your transaction and she flips out. There’s a reason the Karen stereotype is ‘I need to see a manager,’ because in these transactional experiences, we show our worst selves and get so angry and it all comes back to how we’ve been socialised to behave in these settings,” says Gerrard. The odd thing in this scenario is that both sides are flip-flopping between being customer service and Karen, because this isn’t a shop and these aren’t staff – this is a rodeo in a one-(wo)manned china shop.
Brad J Bushman, professor of communication at Ohio State University, tells me it doesn’t surprise him that people speak to each other in passive aggressive ways on there, versus say, social media where profiles are more built-up and personal. “Many studies have shown that if people are anonymous, they’re much more likely to engage in deviant behaviour than when they’re identifiable,” he says. The biggest misconception people have about anger, he adds, is that it’s healthy to release it. “There’s this joke: how do you get to Carnegie Hall [a famous venue for classical music] and the answer is practice, practice, practice. Well, how do you become an angry, aggressive person? The answer is the same: practice, practice, practice. Venting anger keeps the physiological arousal high; it just feeds the flame. And you’re probably ruminating about whatever it is that made you angry, so it’s the worst thing you can do, but people love to do it, right?” You get a good feeling after an angry outburst, which makes it addictive, Bushman says.
Unlike in real life, where verbally abusing your neighbour might get you a visit from the police, on Vinted it’s unlikely you’ll face repercussions for calling someone a cheap slag who will die alone. Reporting abusive users doesn’t guarantee their removal from these apps. But we won’t stop buying from them, will we. As Asos’s business plummets, the high street closes and the cost-of-living crisis endures, haggling and arguing with strangers has become a part of our lives now, and possibly a small price to pay for a thriving secondhand marketplace.
Gina, for one, will never turn her back on the apps. “The amount of times I’ve ordered something drunk, then cancelled it the next day and got into it with the person being like, ‘Sorry my kid bought that on my account.’ I just love to fib,” she says, adding that she doesn’t even think it’s real anger we feel towards these people, more a disrespect born from barter culture colliding with a British predilection for banter. “As a seller, you’re like, ‘Why can’t you afford £1 more?’ and as a buyer, you’re like, ‘Why can’t you afford £1 less. There’s just no stakes in it really.”
Personally, I’d never buy anything expensive – or even anything too cheap – on these apps. The risk in both directions is high. You might be able to trust the great British public in theory, but in practice it becomes difficult when they’re a Depop seller with a wardrobe of wrinkled clothes and an all-inclusive holiday to Málaga to pay for. I sell from time to time on there, too; you’re welcome to insult me with a low offer or an overfamiliar jab. When the most passionate exchange of your week is offered up for free, who am I to resist?
