I paid £130 for lost Heathrow luggage to flog on Vinted – I bagged designer gear, but something made me suspicious
TikToker Lucia, who goes by @luciasisland, shared the moment the battered case landed at her front door and admitted that she was suspicious from the start.
2
'There was no lock on the suitcase,' she told viewers, adding that the smell was "quite stale" and left her worried about what could be lurking inside.
Hopes of a case 'stuffed to the brim with cash and mini Kellys' were quickly dashed, though she joked it could've belonged to someone brave enough to check in an unlocked bag.
In fact, Lucia said she knew someone who did exactly that including putting her engagement ring inside an unlocked suitcase.
"Wild," she added.
Unwrapping the suitcase, Lucia found it was 'battered' with a broken handle.
The dodgy smell didn't help either and she admitted she feared the case might be packed with a man's 'dirty pants and socks'.
But when she cracked it open, the mystery started to unravel.
Lucia discovered the suitcase likely belonged to a Chinese girl, with the first items falling out being two Chinese books and a stash of period pads.
She searched the bag for ID or return tags but came up empty-handed.
'There was nothing,' she said – no purse, no name, no way to trace it back.
I've made £5.6k on Vinted and here are the 7 items you need to upload now to make cash quick - white maxi skirts will sell instantly for a start
There was, however, a single £2 Mexican coin inside, worth around 8p.
Lucia said: 'There's really no such thing as a bad investment if you're just as nosy as me."
But things soon turned around when the TikToker stumbled across brand new clothing items.
Lucia found a £37 skirt with its tags still attached.
She even landed a "cute Abercrombie and Fitch jacket".
As the content creator continued to rummage through, she began to find random items such as a pair of men's shoes, little boys' shorts and an XXL women's dress.
Lucia began to grow suspicious and even suggested the possibility of staff pre-opening suitcases and removing valuables before selling them.
She said: "Does the company that I bought the case from open up all the suitcases, take out all valuables, jewellery and cash, and then top up the suitcases with other people's bits?".
Fans were quick to agree, one user said: "of course they take out the valuables!".
The clip racked up thousands of views and comments, with some fans eager to see what else she unearthed.
However, others were curious as to why she'd want "other people's stuff".
One user commented: "Why would you even buy other people's stuff".
A third added: "I would be scared to open in my house."
How to buy lost luggage
THE famous US store which sells off unclaimed baggage has launched an online shop - so you can buy more travellers' lost items.
The Unclaimed Baggage Center, located in Alabama, has long been a destination for treasure hunters wanting to find a bargain from the abandoned suitcases.
Located in the tiny town of Scottsboro, which has a population of 14,000, it is an unlikely tourist hotspot.
Inside is a megastore of misplaced possessions taken from tens of thousands of suitcases, rucksacks and duffel bags, all lost on commercial flights across the US.
Now, you don't have to travel to the US and can do your shopping online with their new online store.
The centre has launched the online shopping experience as part of their 50th anniversary, having opened in 1970.
Everything from clothing to electronics are found on the website - current items for sale include high-street dresses from $8 up to 18K bracelets worth over $13,000.
They also have a weird and wonderful section which ranges from gold necklaces and diving equipment to designer gowns and signed memorabilia.
Legally, airlines have a duty to reunite luggage with their owners within 90 days, but if that fails, bags end up at the centre.
So frequent are these deliveries that the Unclaimed Baggage Center has around one million items on sale at any time, with 7,000 new items added to the shop floor every day.
Not everything that is found is sold - a third is binned, including all underwear, while another third of it is donated to charity.
Brenda Cantrell, the store's brand ambassador, says: 'Less than half a per cent of all lost luggage fails to make it back to its owners, but that's still thousands of bags every year.
'And the vast majority of those make their way here. We have exclusive contracts with all the major US carriers, making us the only store of this kind anywhere in the country.'
According to journalist Jonathon Thompson who went there himself, the 40,000sqft centre is "more like a swanky department store than a musty charity shop," adding that items are separated into sections, which includes electronics, jewellery and even wedding clothes.
Customers have also found bargains while shopping there - one person bought a £65 vase, only to find out later it was worth £15,000, while one piece of art valued at £45 was actually worth £20,000.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
4 minutes ago
- The Independent
MI5's first female director general Dame Stella Rimington dies aged 90
Dame Stella Rimington, the pioneering first female director general of MI5, has died aged 90, her family announced. Dubbed the "housewife superspy" upon taking the role, she was widely credited as the inspiration for Dame Judi Dench 's M in the James Bond films. Born in South Norwood on 13 May 1935, Dame Stella passed away on Sunday night. In a statement, her family shared: "She died surrounded by her beloved family and dogs and determinedly held on to the life she loved until her last breath." Dame Rimington joined MI5 full time in 1969 after she was recruited as a part-time clerk typist by its office in New Delhi's British High Commission after she accompanied her husband John Rimington on a diplomatic posting there four years earlier. She became director of each of the service's operational branches before she was appointed to deputy director general in 1991 and then director general a year later. During her tenure in the top job, between 1992 and 1996, there were threats from the IRA and Russia, while the Islamist terror threat was also emerging. She was the first to be publicly identified when appointed and when a newspaper published a photo of her house, she and her family had to move to a covert location for their own protection. Mrs Rimington used her time as director general to bring gradually bring the service out of the shadows, dispelling some of the myths and misconceptions built up around it. After leaving MI5 in 1996, Dame Stella began a career as a novelist. Alongside her post-MI5 writing and business commitments, she even found time to chair the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize for literature, although her comment that they were looking for 'readability' found her once again in the firing line from critics who accused her of 'dumbing down' the award. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she reconciled with her husband in 2020 and later moved in together during lockdown. The pair had separated in 1984 but never divorced. 'It's a good recipe for marriage, I'd say,' she said. 'Split up, live separately, and return to it later.'
Times
5 minutes ago
- Times
Sylvia Young obituary: founder of stage school that trained Amy Winehouse
'My school reports are filled with 'could be betters' and 'doesn't work to her full potential',' wrote a 14-year-old Amy Winehouse in her audition letter for the Sylvia Young Theatre School. 'I want to go somewhere where I am stretched right to my limits and perhaps even beyond. But mostly, I have this dream to be very famous. I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes.' Known as the 'Eton of the Pop Idol generation', the school was notoriously competitive — each year 20 students, aged between ten and 16, were accepted out of 800 applicants — but Winehouse's audition was so impressive (she sang a soulful rendition of On the Sunny Side of the Street) that she was offered a scholarship by the founder, Sylvia Young, who remembered her as very talented and very naughty: she never wore the uniform correctly, chewed gum in lessons and was easily bored by school work. 'She wore a silver nose-ring and, when I asked her to take it out, she apologised, removed it, and replaced it an hour later,' Young said. 'I could not ignore it but I understood and we found a way of coexisting. She would break the rules; I would tell her off; and she would acknowledge it.' Though Winehouse left the school early — Young was eager to point out that she wasn't expelled — she was one of many young stars to have emerged from the Sylvia Young Theatre School, which was for many years the most successful and well known of its kind. At the time, most stage schools were still stuck in the 'light entertainment and song and dance' era, she said; Young's was firmly rooted in 'drama'. She provided a newly launched EastEnders with many of its young stars, including Nick Berry and Danniella Westbrook. Almost half the cast of Sam Mendes's 1994 adaptation of Oliver! — and five of the six young leads — were Young's 'babies', as she called her students. Other alumni included the actors Billie Piper, Nicholas Hoult and Daniel Kaluuya, and musicians such as Emma Bunton from the Spice Girls and Dua Lipa. It wasn't always easy to tell who would make it, even though Young had, in hindsight at least, spotted star quality in Winehouse: 'You see the ones that should, but it doesn't always work,' she said. 'It is talent, but it's also the right job at the right time. Pure luck.' Young's idea for the school was born in the early Seventies when, as a part-time librarian with a passion for musical theatre, she began putting on shows in care homes with her two daughters. Soon their primary school in Wanstead, east London, had caught wind of the travelling company and asked Young if she could run an after-school drama group to raise funds for a swimming pool. The classes proved so popular that after the fundraising Young kept them going, charging 10p a lesson — it included a cup of orange squash and a biscuit — at Aldersbrook Baptist Church hall. The Aldersbrook Young 'Uns, as she christened the group, were soon performing music hall-style shows across London. 'I remember coming home and saying to my husband, 'There's not an ounce of talent among them'. It killed me to draw whatever it was out, and then — just when I thought I'd have to chuck it all in — they started blooming, and I found that incredibly rewarding.' People began calling her Sylvia Young-un and the name stuck. • Simon Lipkin: Sylvia Young shaped Amy Winehouse and Rita Ora — she changed my life By 1981 she had gone full time, increasing the fee to 50p a week and hiring a drama teacher who operated from an old sports club in Drury Lane, in which classes were held in an old boxing ring. The school later moved to Marylebone, and then to a converted church near Marble Arch, its present location. At the start, academic standards were not a priority for Young, who would happily halt school for four weeks to rehearse a play, but when league tables were introduced in the 1990s the school was forced to bring in qualified teachers and three days of academic teaching, leaving Thursday and Friday for singing, dancing and acting lessons. Although it became known as 'a sausage factory' for famous people — 'and I suppose it is', Young said, 'but they're individually made sausages, not mass-produced' — she had an eagle eye for pushy parents, who would write and claim to have a child with prodigious talent. 'Sometimes they're right,' she said. 'More often you have to say, 'There might be something there. Do carry on with your singing.' You can tell when a child is being pushed. I get a little report on Mum too. We can't bear the dance-school thing here — we do get a few lispy little girls. I gently squash them.' She was born Sylvia Bakal in Whitechapel, east London, in 1939, the eldest of nine children to Abraham, a tailor's presser of Belgian and Romanian heritage who later owned a betting shop, and Sophie (née Wexler), also from Romania. A thespian in the making, Sylvia liked to claim her grandmother knew Leon Trotsky as 'little uncle Leo'. During the war she was sent to live with a mining family in a village near Barnsley. On her return to London, where they lived in a three-bedroom council flat, she visited the local library every day to read — mostly plays. By the age of 16 she had left school and taken a job as a librarian, 'primarily because I wanted to be able to buy stockings'. She had hopes of becoming a star but suffered from stage fright: when she joined Mountview theatre company in north London she would lose her voice before every production, in what she later recognised as panic attacks. In her early twenties she married Norman Ruffell, a telephone engineer at the Post Office, and became something of a stay-at-home mother, though she was never what one might call domestic. 'I don't cook,' she said. 'My kitchen is bare. In fact my whole house bears the signs of someone who doesn't spend much time there. Dinner could be another ready meal or egg on toast.' Her husband did all the cooking, cleaning and ironing. On family holidays to Pontins camps, Young entered her daughters into talent contests. One, Frances, was a pupil at the Sylvia Young Theatre School but was promptly thrown out for answering back too much. She went on to win a Tony for playing Éponine Thénardier in the original West End production of Les Misérables. Her sister, Alison, is now managing director of the school. Young is survived by both daughters and her husband. Petite and matronly, with a soft, plummy accent, Young was a mother figure to many of her students, but she came under criticism, too. Billie Piper's autobiography claimed that the school instilled a negative body image in its pupils: Young was left to dismiss claims that the girls were fed carrots and forced to walk around in ankle weights. Young kept in touch with Winehouse after she left the school, arranging an audition with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra when she was 16. As the singer's struggles with fame and addiction began making headlines in 2007 she wrote an open letter to the Daily Mail: 'I want her to become a legend — but in her lifetime, not after.' At the end of the letter she reprinted Winehouse's audition essay. Sylvia Young OBE, stage school head, was born on September 18, 1939. She died on July 30, 2025, aged 85
The Sun
5 minutes ago
- The Sun
Love Island star Lauren reveals real reason Tommy and Lucy split with cutting comment
LOVE Island star Lauren has revealed the real reason Tommy and Lucy have split with a cutting comment on TikTok. Tommy Bradley and Lucy Quinn were savagely dumped from the villa, but appeared to stay solid in the outside world and built on their romantic connection. 5 5 5 And the pair looked loved up as they put on a united front. But just days later, it appeared that the couple had split. Now in a TikTok post, Lauren who was involved in a love triangle with Lauren Wood and Toni Laites. has revealed why Lucy is no longer with Tommy. In the video clip Lauren and Lucy were answering questions from some Love Island fans. And when they questioned Lucy's relationship status, Lauren said: "No, she's no longer with Tommy. "Everybody wants to know about you and Tommy Lou." She then continued to say: "They're just not together anymore, He couldn't behave himself." Lucy added: "Yeah he couldn't behave himself." Fans were quick to comment and one wrote: "Seems like things have taken a turn for Lauren and Lucy. Axed Casa Amor star Lucy shows ex Tommy what he's missing in skintight black dress after split "Wonder what happened between them and Tommy? Could be some juicy drama ahead!" Another added: "Think this might be because he was talking to Megan on the outside before she went back into the villa." "Not nice of him to treat her like that," added another fan. While one follower said: "But Harrison could behave himself?." There is no denying that this season has been the raunchiest yet, for nearly a decade, with crew forced to take action on behalf of frisky cast. It comes after Islanders coined a new term for one sex act based on footballer Andy Carroll. And for the first time since 2016, production took the step of ordering in more c ondoms to ensure there was protection available. 5 5
