After looting spree, France summons online resellers over stolen-goods sales

After a weekend of looting across France, the fight has moved online. The French government has summoned major online resale platforms, including Vinted and eBay, to check whether new listings include goods stolen during the unrest.

France's digital affairs minister, Anne Le Hénanff, wrote on X on Monday that the government expects the platforms to remove the listings in question without delay. She said they will also be required to work closely with public authorities so that those reselling potentially stolen goods can be identified and prosecuted.

The minister and fellow cabinet members called a 7 p.m. meeting with representatives of Vinted, Amazon, eBay, Meta and TikTok. Representatives of Leboncoin, France's leading independent reselling platform, will also attend.

At a government press conference earlier in the day, small business minister Serge Papin said officials were working on coordination between investigators and online platforms to identify the individuals behind suspicious listings. A specific protocol is expected to be put in place, according to a government source.

A spokesperson for Vinted France said the sale of stolen goods, or soliciting the purchase of such goods, is strictly prohibited on the platform, describing a zero-tolerance policy. Since the weekend, its teams have taken immediate action to identify and remove listings that may involve stolen goods and have stepped up monitoring of suspicious listings.

Other platforms were not immediately available for comment. The discussions are also likely to touch on longer-term questions around platform responsibility and the monitoring of illicit trade within the EU's digital marketplace.

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the issue of looted goods sold on online marketplaces is 'a new dimension', and that the Commission is happy to look at it in collaboration with the French authorities.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has instructed local authorities to enact partial curfews on Monday evening to prevent further looting and rioting.

Papin said a special support fund will be set up to provide financial assistance to the estimated 3,000 local businesses affected by the weekend's unrest.

The weekend's violence and looting have created a major crisis for the French government. Alongside calming the unrest on the streets, blocking the economic afterlife of the crime — the online trade in stolen goods — has become a major challenge.

The success of the initiative will depend on what protocol emerges from the meeting with the online platforms and how far they go in removing listings and identifying sellers.

The message from the French authorities is clear: to shut down the market for looted goods, the technology platforms must stand alongside the police.