The website that purports to auction off homes that are in some form of economic distress, i.e., short sales or foreclosures, auction.com, is an ABSOLUTE SCAM! They have a reserve amount, that they will not reveal, and the auctioneer is free to bid up the price if the starting bid has been set lower than the reserve amount and existing REAL bids have not yet met the reserve price, and then, when the auction is over, they conceal all details of the bidding. It is not only unfair, it borders on criminal.
Just say “no” to auction.com.
I registered to bid on a house for which the starting bid was $40K, and subsequent bids were, by rule of the website, in $10K increments.
The house had, at one time, been listed for $129K, and more recently listed for $148,100.
Someone started off early with the starting bid amount of $40K.
I bid $50K, and was fairly quickly outbid 4 more times, so that the current bid was at $90K, where it stayed for a couple days, until around noon of the day the auction was scheduled to close.
Suddenly the bid amount shot up to $143,100, and the bid increment was changed from $10K to $5K, which seems to me just a bit too convenient — that the next bid would take it to the list price of $148,100, the original list price, and furthermore, there was no way a “real” bidder could have gotten to $143,100 by using $10K increments from any prior bid. Had to have been the auctioneer that bid the price up to $143,100.
That’s not an auction; it is, at best, wasting “real” bidders’ time, and, at worst, it is deliberately deceptive.
(Refer to pissedconsumer.com review #787129.)