The law obliges Vinted’s payment providers to hold a seller’s money until a check passes. Nothing obliges anyone to build a system in which the only party able to fix a failed check is not the party running it.
Mali Osmelak never imagined selling clothes on Vinted would end in court, the BBC has reported. In March, she opened a Vinted Pro account for her second-hand gymwear company, made almost £6,000 in sales within weeks, and then found she could not withdraw any of it.
Her verification kept failing. Vinted says her documents “did not match the name on her Vinted account”; Osmelak told the BBC she had flagged an error Vinted made with her name, but “nothing was done”.
Mangopay, which ran Vinted sellers’ wallets at the time, sent her back to Vinted. Three days after she filed a small claims case against both companies, her account was “magically verified”, she said.
Azri Mukthar, a sportswear seller, has spent more than a year trying to withdraw almost £2,500, with a Companies House certificate declined 15 times, he told the BBC. Vinted says he “did not provide all the required documents”; Mangopay would not comment on individual cases.
Neither case is really a story of overzealous compliance. What both describe is a division of responsibility which leaves the seller with nobody able to help.
Vinted: who decides and who can fix it
Vinted does not hold its sellers’ money. Its regulated wallet providers do, in Osmelak’s case Mangopay, authorised by the FCA as an e-money institution (EMI) in 2023, and they run the identity checks.
Under regulation 31 of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, a firm unable to complete due diligence on a customer must not transact with them, so a failed check freezes the balance by law. The money is safe in the meantime, because e-money firms must safeguard customer funds and, under the FCA’s CASS 15 regime, reconcile them daily.
Mangopay’s verification flow fills in a user’s details from the platform’s records and compares the name on the ID against them. When the two disagree, its documentation says the platform must correct its record before the same document can pass. Osmelak could have uploaded her passport as often as she liked, because the error lay in Vinted’s data rather than her document.
Mangopay’s system also tells the platform why each check failed, whether a registration extract is more than three months old or the ID holder is missing from the registry’s list of directors. Whether the seller is told the reason is Vinted’s decision to make, though Mukthar complained there was “no clear system to follow”.
What fixing it would cost
None of this suits Vinted, which charges sellers no listing fee and runs a wallet in which sellers’ earnings are spent again as buyers. Its providers answer to regulators instead.
For them, holding the money is the lawful default and releasing it in error the costly mistake: Vixio counted $40.7m (€36m) in fines against European payment and e-money firms across 30 enforcement actions in a single year, so non-compliance often proves costly. In opposition to this, though, is the FCA’s Consumer Duty, which bars unreasonable barriers for retail customers, micro-enterprises among them.
Letting sellers see and correct the name Vinted passes to its provider would have removed the cause of Osmelak’s problem at a stroke, and passing on the refusal reason in plain English would give sellers something to act on besides another upload.
Complete transparency has a legal limit, however: the Proceeds of Crime Act makes it an offence for a regulated firm to disclose a suspicious activity report where doing so is likely to prejudice an investigation. An expired document can be explained freely; a refusal tied to such a report cannot.
Vinted’s help centre says Mangopay can request documents once a seller reaches its withdrawal limits, so trading begins before the full check is done, and Mukthar made 30 to 40 sales before his verification showed as pending.
Verifying business sellers before their listings go live would stop a failed check freezing money already earned, but would move the friction to Vinted’s sign-up stage, where drop-off rates climb as verification adds steps, documents or waiting.
HM Treasury guidance from February 2026 lets firms meet the identity requirement in the Money Laundering Regulations through certified digital identity services, which could spare the people behind a business the ritual of uploading documents, though each firm still answers for its own due diligence.
None of these fixes needs a change in the law. Each needs Vinted and its providers to settle who owns a seller’s problem before the seller has to ask a court to settle it for them.
