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Even get royally F'ed by an auction house

Speedie

Stainless
Joined
Feb 24, 2009
Location
Midwestern MN/Wi USA
Let hear your story!

Last year I bought a YAG laser on auction in florida. Auction house was Moecker auctions. Won the item, called their offices to arrainge wire transfer, no-one picked up, called the next day left a message, contacted Bidspotter and they didnt get back to me right away so I quickly paid for the item. Got a call the third day saying everything has to be out by 3 (this was at 1pm). Called the owner of the auction house....he gives me crap for not calling them. I told him how I left a message and called and called he then tells me "tough luck". I gave him a ear full. Moecker or Moeker or PECKER or whatever ...DO NOT DEAL WITH THESE GUYS.

I lost out a a cool grand...would have been even cooler if I got the machine.



:bawling::bawling::bawling::bawling:Wheaties:bawling::bawling::bawling:
 
If I had time I would go down and kick some heads in myself however I didnt at the time now it has been over a year. They still send me emails that was getting my blood to boil so I thought..."I cant be the only ahole that got aholed by these aholes"

All I can do is whine...not very good at it either
 
You should look in the yellow pages under Italian Persuasion and hire the right people
to pay those auction people a visit.
 
Boy, I hate telling this, but.......about 15 years ago I was reading thru a local shopper paper that always had loads of auction listings. One that caught my eye was a huge auction down in Branson Missouri where they were selling off the contents of the Boxcar Willie museum (I guess it was a museum- a place where he had all the crap he'd collected over the years). Boxcar Willie was a sort of country western singer and he had recently passed away.

Anyway, they had a lot of pictures in the sale listing. It was a full two page spread, and the pictures only took up the center of the page. The rest was written listings of all the stuff. It must have been a huge auction.

The number one thing that caught my eye was a steam locomotive whistle in the pictures. A big one. There were lots of them in the picture, but this particular one was the kind I had been lusting after. I had got into whistle collecting and had a small array hoarded, and in these parts whistles are not readily available.

I think I had discovered the internet, and ebay, at that time- I can't recall for sure. Somehow or other, I had knowledge of a similar style of whistle selling for $3200 in the distant past. (Had to be on ebay, but anyway....)

So, with that in mind I call the auction company listing the sale. I tell them I am interested in this certain whistle in the sale bill picture, and that I would sure like to bid on it but I can't make it to the sale in person. Could I place a bid with you over the phone and have someone bid on it for me at the auction. "Sure, no problem" was the reply.

Well, I tell them that I would go as high as $3200. I thought to myself at the time that no one in their right mind would give that much, but I wanted that thing bad. There was soooo much other great collectible stuff at that sale I figured no one would spend much on this big chunk of brass. I wanted to give myself a lot of cushion for when they start the bidding, it could weed out the bidders who would just be buying it for resale. I really thought it would go for 800 or a 1000 at the most, but I wanted to be sure I got it. It doesn't hurt to have a high max bid to insure you get something, I thought to myself. Don't want to miss it by ten dollars or some such trivial amount.

So, sale day comes and goes. The next monday I call the auctioneers' office and explain who I am and all that. I ask if I won the whistle or not. "Yes, you did." So, I ask, what are the damages. $3200 she responds. I was in shock but I didn't let on. At first I thought she was kidding, so I asked again and the reply was the same.

Well, I got their address and sent them a check. The whistle showed up a few days later via UPS. It was big and heavy and all I thought it would be....and shipping wasn't included in the sale price!

As I reflected on the experience, I am about sure that they started out with my high limit and got no other bids. I didn't actually instruct them to do anything one way or another. I just told them my maximum amount and left it at that.

I was ashamed to ask them because I was on the hook for it and didn't think there was any legal way to wiggle out of it. I just found it amazing that I managed to have the exact high bid amount as my max.

So, I have a beautiful, working example of a big 3 chime Hancock "Steamboat" whistle setting there in the shop gathering dust. I've plumbed it into a big compressed air system and blown the heck out of it. It is awe inspiring listening to it.... but not $3200 dollars worth.

An expensive lesson. I am glad I got it, but I have doubts that I could ever get that much out of it if I were to ever try to sell it.
 
I've been in this business for a couple of decades, attended hundreds of auctions... and can tell you that Moecker is the most despicable auction group I've ever dealt with.

Florida has been a strange place for me for auctions over the years. Two of the best auctions I've ever been to were in Florida....but so have some of the worst. The absolute worst is described below in a post from years ago.

======================================

Auction from Hell (Summer 2004, Moecker Auction in Florida, High end CNC woodworking shop)

On Wednesday in Tampa, FL had an auction happen of such assholity I was amazed. Stay with me here cause my following sentence isn't quite it. They offered a bulk bid of the whole place, to be compared with the total of each item individually and if the individual items totaled within 5 percent less than the bulk bid, then the auction would stand and everyone got their items.

Well, this was only slightly irritating, as this is done sometimes and only once have I ever seen the bulk bidder to bid high enough that the individual bids didn't go much higher such that it became a moot point.

Me and one other older fellow were the only bidders for the whole place (don't be impressed...small shop ). I dropped out and his final bid was way lower than the total would likely be ($31,000 just to give a sense of it)

So anyway, the auction progresses in 100 degree heat, as they had no electricity for the wall fans and it was the middle of summer in Tampa, Florida. The old man gets a few CNC machines, I get a few cool things, others get lots of treasures.

About half way thru the auctioneer announces the *bulk bidder has decided to up his bid to $45,000* Whaaaaa ?!!? You can't do that ! I say. To which auctioneer says oh yes we can, read section 2 of paragraph 8 of the bid contract we handed out. I say, but besides the fact that this is never done, this was *not advertised* that you can do this, so I drove 7 hours to find this out ? He then says bulk bidder "is a gentleman" and his agreed to not up his bid any more. I figure $45K still not likely to take it, so I settle down and we proceed.

Auction ends, total is $55,000 everyone gets ready to pay, auctioneer announces 'everyone leave the building' while they call the trustee to confirm price is enough. Whaaaaaa ?!1??

After some wait, see folks 'paying' so I figure all is ok. But when I go to pay I'm informed that the bulk bidder upped his bid to $58,000 and bought the whole place !!!!!
The folks I thought were paying were just getting their deposits back ! (yes, as if everything else wasn't stupid enough, the auctioneers were so assholic as to require a 25 percent cash deposit as the auction progressed and your totals increased)

There's actually much more to this story, some of it quite funny, but my finger tips are getting tired so I'll just end this segment by saying that it boggles my mind that any auctioneer would do something so underhanded as to allow the totals of all these folks standing around sweating all day, loosing work income, etc, to be outbid *at the end* of the auction, when the bulk bidder knows exactly what it takes to get the whole deal.
 
As I reflected on the experience, I am about sure that they started out with my high limit and got no other bids. I didn't actually instruct them to do anything one way or another. I just told them my maximum amount and left it at that.

I was ashamed to ask them because I was on the hook for it and didn't think there was any legal way to wiggle out of it. I just found it amazing that I managed to have the exact high bid amount as my max.
Yeah that is highly suspect, but unless they were willing to call you live as it was being auctioned, you really didn't have any choice.

I have a sort of opposite story, where there was a nice Maho CNC mill being auctioned from a university in Texas. The auctioneer had his own website with the possiblity of entering proxy bids, so I entered $4,000 or so. Afternoon of the auction I find out it actually sold for $2,500 !!! WTF ??

So I call the auctioneer and find out they "forgot" about my proxy bid ! So they contact the guy who got it for $2,500 (incl. buyer prem, btw), and tell him I will pay $4K for it...but he had already moved it to his place by then and doesn't want to sell even at that, so I am SOL. Needless to say, I am hopping mad at the auctioneer, but that's all they are going to do. It's not impossible that the guy that got it for $2,500 would have outbid me anyway, but I'll always wonder. Oh well, move on to the next one.
 
Thank you for confirming again why Moecker is horrible to do business with.
Thinking back on it, I now remember there was a really tight time constraint on getting the machines out of that place too. So tight that the codger that bought everything ended up selling much of it the next day to many of us who were at the auction. I even got a few pieces for less than I bid the previous day...LOL. So the "more money than sense, I'll be Mr. Bigshot and buy the whole place" codger royally screwed up in the end.

But still, the whole sordid senario and probably the ridiculous time constraints were Moeckers doing. I can't say they are flat out crooks but they create situations that are just so ridiculous that they are untenable to deal with. The irony is if they conducted business like a normal auctioneer they would probably end up with more money in the end. But they are too paranoid and assholic to know this.

The situation in your case however sounds like they may have ventured into flat out crook territory as they probably didn't answer the phone on purpose so as to create your bad situation to their advantage. I would keep after them, and perhaps contact whatever organization in FL deals with auctioneer liscenses. They are bound to have many previous complaints about Moecker so perhaps your complaint might be the straw that breaks their backs.
 








 
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