Contents
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
At Recommerce Buzz 2026 in Berlin, three leaders tackled the question every resale platform has to answer: what does it take to trust a stranger enough to hit “Buy”? The conversation kept coming back to recommerce fraud: how it has changed, and what trust and safety teams at resale platforms need to do to stay ahead of it.
Recommerce, the resale of pre-owned goods, has gone from niche to mainstream. Fraud has followed it there.
On 6 October, Besedo CEO Louise Barnekow joined Charles Bellois of Vestiaire Collective and Hakan Orhun of sahibinden.com on stage at Recommerce Buzz. Their panel compared three very different approaches to authentication, grading and fraud prevention. One platform employs 100 authenticators. Another inspects phones before they change hands. The third builds the infrastructure that keeps scams off marketplaces.
Different models, same conclusion: trust is the bedrock of resale, and you never finish building it.
Executive summary (TL;DR)
- Fraud has industrialised. Lone scammers have been replaced by organised crime operating at scale, across borders, with the latest AI tools.
- AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement. It catches obvious fakes and points experts to the right risks, but human judgement (and touch, and smell) still decides the hard cases.
- Automation without accuracy is a false win. You can automate 100% of decisions. The real question is how many of them are right.
- Trust has to be designed in, not bolted on. Silos between product, trust and safety, and customer support leave gaps fraudsters exploit.
- Trust costs money, and that’s the point. Both Vestiaire Collective and sahibinden.com chose to absorb losses to earn it.
Watch the full panel: “Fakes, Frauds and ‘Is This Even Real?’: Building Trust at Scale”, Recommerce Buzz 2026.
Meet the panel
- Hakan Orhun, sahibinden.com. Responsible for secondhand selling and e-commerce at Turkey’s leading C2C marketplace, which has more than 65 million monthly active users.
- Louise Barnekow, CEO, Besedo. Besedo is trust and safety infrastructure that keeps scams and fraud off marketplaces, combining technology with human validation. It has specialised in marketplaces for 25 years.
- Charles Bellois, COO, Vestiaire Collective. Oversees physical and digital operations plus trust: authentication, quality, fraud and customer service. Vestiaire is around 90% C2C and physically checks items before they ship to buyers.
Fraud Has Gone Industrial
As second-hand shopping has grown, so has fraud. But the biggest shift isn’t the volume. It’s who is behind it.
“From the beginning it was mainly bad actors, individuals that tried to scam people. Now it’s industrialised. It’s organised crime at scale.”
Louise Barnekow, CEO, Besedo
These networks are sophisticated, use the latest technology and operate across countries and cultures. At Vestiaire Collective, Charles sees it in everything that isn’t physical: payment fraud, shipping fraud, fake accounts and fake websites built to divert buyers. AI has made all of it cheaper and faster for fraudsters.
However polished the scam, the goal is usually the same: get the user off the platform, where they have no protection. That’s why Vestiaire treats repeated attempts to move transactions off-platform as a fraud pattern, educating offenders first and closing accounts if needed.
What recommerce fraud looks like
Recommerce fraud is any attempt to deceive buyers, sellers or the platform during the resale of pre-owned goods. Across the panel, the most common forms were:
- Counterfeits: fake goods listed as authentic, from obvious fakes to elaborate copies only experts can spot.
- Items not as described: the product doesn’t match the listing’s photos, condition or description.
- Off-platform diversion: moving the buyer to a channel where the platform can no longer protect them.
- Payment and shipping fraud: scams that target the money or the parcel rather than the item.
- Fake accounts and fake websites: impersonating sellers, or the platform itself, to divert buyers.
Besedo blocks more than 60 million fraud attempts a year across the platforms it protects. Fraud also costs sales: in Besedo’s 2023 survey of 703 marketplace users, 80% had avoided a purchase because they didn’t trust a listing. See how marketplace fraud prevention works.
The topic platforms still avoid
Platforms have become much more open about scams and fraud. Almost everyone has been scammed or knows someone who has, and educating users is now part of the job.
But Louise pointed to a second category that is still rarely discussed: serious criminal activity such as trafficking, drug dealing and child abuse.
“I understand that it’s a very difficult topic to approach, and I respect that. But I think it’s important for organisations like Besedo, or NGOs, to create awareness about what can actually happen on the platforms.”
Louise Barnekow, CEO, Besedo
Talking about it openly is part of addressing it.
AI Is a Co-pilot, Not an Autopilot
In pre-owned luxury fashion, authentication is everything. Vestiaire Collective has spent 18 years turning authentication expertise into data. It built the Vestiaire Academy: a single source of knowledge for authenticators across four sites on different continents. New authenticators train for around three months, then keep training weekly as new brands, models and counterfeits appear.
That structured knowledge is what makes AI useful. First, AI ranked risk so the strongest experts met the strongest risks. Then it began telling experts where to look on an item. Now it is starting to support decisions.
“The journey of AI is that it turns an expert into a super expert.”
Charles Bellois, Vestiaire Collective
But there are limits.
“When we do expertise, you’re going to smell the leather, you’re going to touch the fabric. This is something that AI is still not able to do. Yet, at least.”
Charles Bellois, Vestiaire Collective
AI easily catches obvious fakes, like a misspelled brand name or a wrong logo. The real challenge is the elaborate ones. Vestiaire makes around three million human authentication decisions a year, and those decisions are what train its models.
Automation Is Easy. Accuracy Is the Point.
Many marketplaces frame trust and safety as a choice: automate to save costs, or rely on human moderators to stay accurate. Asked how the two should work together, Louise rejected the trade-off.
“It’s not the tech versus the humans, it’s them together working as a system.”
Louise Barnekow, CEO, Besedo
Modern technology can automate 97–98% of decisions. The last few percent need humans in the loop to:
- investigate flagged content and spot new patterns
- handle the fallout in customer support, from appeals to account takeovers
- feed what they learn back into the models
How far to automate is a risk decision, made use case by use case. Some platforms prioritise cost and accept higher automation. Others lower it where catching every fraudulent item matters most.
Finding the right balance between automation and human review is exactly what Besedo helps marketplaces do. See how our AI + human moderation works →
Trust Has to Be Designed In, Not Bolted On
Trust is now on the strategic agenda for most marketplaces. Yet Louise sees the same problem again and again: no clear owner. Is it product, operations, customer support or a dedicated team? Who holds the budget?
The result is “moderation debt”: solutions built up over time that buckle when AI-driven scams scale up. Too often, trust and safety teams join at the go/no-go meeting, just before launch, and find loopholes that will later land in customer support.
“We need to focus on the 98% that are good users. Trust and safety should be invisible, seamless.”
Louise Barnekow, CEO, Besedo
Safety by design means involving every stakeholder from the start, across the whole customer journey. It also means an architecture that scales from 5,000 ads to 50 million.
The same logic applies when an item doesn’t match its listing. The seller is responsible for an honest description, but buyers blame the platform. That’s why layers like buyer insurance and smooth returns are part of the trust stack.
Earning Trust Means Investing (and Accepting Losses)
sahibinden.com was founded in 2000 and is a leading player in real estate and automotive in Turkey. Its brand trust didn’t come from marketing.
“Building that brand trust is not a marketing campaign. It’s about your return policy, it’s about your execution.”
Hakan Orhun, sahibinden.com
The company accepted losses to build that trust. The same thinking drove it into refurbished phones: a new phone is listed every 17 seconds, and buyers and sellers rarely agree on price. Previously, sellers sent phones straight to refurbishers, who could revise their offer if the condition didn’t match. Now sahibinden.com sits in the middle:
- The seller accepts the best refurbisher offer and sends the phone to sahibinden.com.
- sahibinden.com checks the condition.
- If it matches, the seller is paid and the phone goes to the refurbisher.
- If it doesn’t, every refurbisher revises their offer, not just one.
“So that means it’s a fairer level and it’s transparency.”
Hakan Orhun, sahibinden.com
The platform now receives hundreds of thousands of offers a week, and conversion rates are rising. For Hakan, it’s also a circular economy story: refurbishment keeps phones in use for longer, which he estimates could be worth around $3 billion a year to Turkey’s economy alone.
At Vestiaire Collective, trust is just as deliberate an investment: 160 people work on trust, around 100 of them on authentication. AI hasn’t yet made authentication cheaper, Charles said, but it has cut costs in customer service, fraud and listing.
“Trust is a cost of running business for a C2C platform.”
Charles Bellois, Vestiaire Collective
Hakan’s take was similar: AI hasn’t made sahibinden.com faster yet, because the team analyses more before each decision, but it has reduced mistakes. His practical tip for the audience: analyse your call centre calls against your FAQs.
Key Takeaways for Recommerce Leaders
We asked each panelist for the one thing the audience should leave with.
- Trust is a journey with no finish line (Charles). Just when you think you’ve solved fraud, AI makes fraudsters more resilient and more cost-effective. Be prepared to keep investing.
- Break down the silos (Louise). Make safety by design real by getting product, trust and safety, operations and support working on processes end to end, from the very start.
- Dream big, act now (Hakan). Don’t just use AI to automate what you already do. Imagine where trust is heading, and build toward it.
Recommerce fraud FAQs
Recommerce fraud is any attempt to deceive buyers, sellers or the platform during the resale of pre-owned goods. It ranges from counterfeits and items that don’t match their listing to payment fraud, fake accounts and attempts to move buyers off-platform. Today much of it is run by organised networks rather than lone scammers.
A trust and safety team keeps a platform’s users safe and its marketplace trustworthy. It sets and enforces content policies, reviews flagged listings, chats and accounts, investigates fraud and new scam patterns, and handles appeals and account takeovers alongside customer support.
The leaders combine human experts with AI. At Vestiaire Collective, around 100 authenticators make about three million authentication decisions a year, while AI ranks risk and shows experts where to look. sahibinden.com checks refurbished phones itself before the seller is paid.
As much as you can do accurately. Automation rates of 97–98% are achievable, but the right level depends on the risk in each use case.
Stop recommerce fraud before it reaches your buyers
Fraud has gone industrial. Your trust and safety needs to scale with it. We’re Besedo, trust and safety infrastructure for marketplaces and recommerce platforms worldwide. We combine AI with human expertise to stop scams, counterfeits and fraud before they reach your buyers:
- AI + human in the loop: automation where it’s accurate, expert review where it matters
- Real-time protection: less than 50 ms average response times
- Global reach: moderation in 100+ languages, with cultural understanding
- Built for marketplaces: helping classifieds and resale platforms build trust since 2002.
Running a marketplace or recommerce platform? Book a 30-minute demo and we’ll show you how Besedo could catch the fraud your current setup misses. Request a demo →
Not ready for a demo? Watch the full panel.
Share this article
