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!”
normal? Where have our famous manners gone?
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.
It’s pandemonium, it’s insanity and it’s a whole lot of drama over a pair of denim shorts
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.
Illustration: Stephan Schmitz/The ObserverTake 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.
Haggling and arguing online has now become part of our lives
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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