Verification Failures Blocked Access to Thousands in Seller Funds
A Vinted seller who turned to online resale to support herself while managing Crohn’s disease and caring for her young daughter ended up in court after being locked out of almost £6,000 held in her Vinted wallet. The dispute exposes how a routine compliance check can become a major financial and personal crisis when platform systems fail to resolve obvious errors quickly enough.
Mali Osmelak began selling second-hand clothing on Vinted in 2024 as a side income. Demand for her gymwear grew fast, and within months she had formed a limited company to scale the business. This year she moved to a Vinted Pro seller account, the version intended for people selling at higher volumes through a registered business. Within weeks, sales had reached nearly £6,000. The money, however, remained out of reach.
When she tried to withdraw her earnings, Vinted restricted the account and required a verification process. Osmelak says the documents she had already prepared for the business should have satisfied the check. She also says she identified an error in the name on the account and flagged it to the platform, but the verification kept failing and automated replies became the only response she received. Her experience is a familiar one for customers trapped inside digital compliance systems: once an account is flagged, every request for clarification can trigger the same loop rather than a human review.
The consequence was immediate. Funds from her sales sat inaccessible for eight weeks. She then filed a small claims action against Vinted and Mangopay, the payments company that at the time operated seller wallets and processed transactions on the platform. The court fees came to £455.
Stress, Delay and the Cost of Locked Funds
The dispute was not just about a failed withdrawal. For Osmelak, the blocked money represented income tied to a household already under strain. She was selling while living with Crohn’s disease and caring for her four-year-old daughter, a combination that makes unpredictable income far more disruptive than it might be for a seller treating the platform as a casual marketplace. When a seller depends on cash flow for rent, food, childcare or treatment-related expenses, even a temporary hold can create a serious gap.
Three days after the claim was filed, Osmelak says the account was “magically verified” and she was able to withdraw the money. She continued with the case anyway, seeking recovery of the court fees, costs and interest. In June, the court entered a default judgment after neither company responded to the claim, ordering payment of £1,207.50.
She has still not received that money. Vinted and Mangopay have since applied to have the judgment set aside, with a hearing scheduled for December. The legal process has now become almost as burdensome as the original verification failure, stretching a simple payment dispute into months of uncertainty. For a small seller, that delay can be as consequential as an account suspension because it freezes revenue already earned through completed transactions.
Vinted said Osmelak’s check was not successful because her documents did not match the name on her account. The company said it has since helped her update the details and that her account is now verified. Mangopay said it is bound by professional secrecy and data protection obligations and cannot comment on individual cases.
A single mismatch in account identity can immobilize money that has already been earned.
Other Sellers Describe the Same Pattern of Repeated Rejection
Osmelak’s case is not isolated. Sportswear seller Azri Mukthar told the BBC that he has been trying to withdraw almost £2,500 for more than a year. He had already registered a limited company, submitted the documentation requested and initially received approval from Vinted. He then uploaded products and quickly generated 30 to 40 sales. The problem began when he tried to access the proceeds.
Mukthar says Vinted told him verification was pending and that he was repeatedly asked to resubmit documents, only to receive immediate rejection messages. He described the process as having no clear route to completion. He also said a Companies House certificate requested by Vinted had been declined 15 times. He has now stopped selling on the platform and says he will likely have to pursue legal action.
For both sellers, the core issue is not simply the existence of compliance checks. Platforms processing money on behalf of large numbers of users need identity verification, fraud controls and regulatory safeguards. The problem arises when automated systems cannot distinguish between an incomplete submission and a solvable data-entry error, or when the user is unable to get a timely human review. In those circumstances, the verification process stops serving as a safeguard and starts functioning as a barrier to access.
Vinted said Mukthar’s check could not be completed because he did not provide all the required documents, and that its support team is in contact with him to help with verification. The gap between those explanations and the sellers’ experiences is the central dispute: one side sees missing paperwork, the other sees a closed loop of rejected uploads and no clear path forward.
For sellers handling essential income, that distinction is not abstract. It determines whether earned money is available this week or locked away for months while an algorithm, a help desk and a court decide who is right.