Looters hit 3,000 French businesses. Within hours, the haul was trending on Vinted under the riot’s date

As French protesters took to the street this week over the country’s escalating debt crisis, poor school conditions, and political gridlock, retailers were caught in the crossfire.

More than 3,000 businesses were looted or damaged over the weekend, according to Commerce Minister Serge Papin, including shops in Paris’s Les Halles district. Those shops included Hermes, North Face, and Louis Vuitton. Just hours after looters rummaged through stores at the sites of demonstrations, online listings of cosmetic and skincare products and handbags began popping up on e-commerce platforms, raising concerns of widespread resale of stolen goods.

By Monday evening, Papin and digital minister Anne Le Hénanff had summoned Vinted, French secondhand marketplace Leboncoin, Amazon, eBay, Meta, and TikTok to a videoconference to demand the listings come down.

Vinted, Europe’s leading online secondhand marketplace, said it had taken steps to mitigate suspicious listings on its platform.

“The sale of stolen goods, or soliciting them, is strictly prohibited on Vinted, and we have zero tolerance for it,” a Vinted spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “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.”

“We’re seeing a clear spike in listings for luxury items,” a Vinted spokesperson previously told trade outlet RetailDetail, adding that such items don’t normally appear in those volumes.

Retail theft has become a growing problem as organized retail crime becomes more sophisticated, ballooning from a $45 billion problem in 2024 to a projected $53 billion, according to security firm Pinkerton. Retailers report organized crime groups increasingly using a complex system of gift card fraud, phone scams, and supply chain theft, according to the National Retail Federation. The........

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