‘Do you have any more shoes? I need as many as you can find for my daughters.’ I had just made my first sale on the second-hand marketplace Vinted and, already, here was a message from a new customer wanting more. Delighted, I scrambled around and managed to locate more than a dozen pairs of no-longer-wanted, muddy old shoes. ‘Don’t worry about cleaning them,’ came the reply from ‘Mariella’ when I told her the good news. ‘They’re just for the garden.’ Slightly odd, I thought, but my customer seemed harmless enough: a part-time cleaner with young children who, she told me rather quaintly, was married to a cobbler. 

It was only when I had to ship the huge black bin liner of shoes that I realised I had been duped. When I printed off the delivery label with my customer’s name and address – generated by the app only after a sale goes through – I found that ‘Mariella’ was in fact a man called John. Closer inspections of his reviews from other sellers showed they were full of contradictory stories. ‘Hope the shoes help your African charity,’ read one; ‘All the best for the unshod children at school,’ read another. Oh dear. I think I had come across my first foot fetishist.

That’s just........

© The Spectator