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Accidental Fine Art on eBay
from the hmmmm dept
The NY Times has some in depth coverage on the story of a garage sale painting being sold for $135,000 on eBay. It seems some people believe this painting is actually by Richard Diebenkorn, the famous artist. However, the seller wouldn't let people look at the painting. You would think, once he heard the rumors that it was a famous painting he would try to sell it through appropriate channels, especially since similar paintings have sold for millions of dollars. Update: A new story in the NY Times reveals a lot more including the fact that the guy lied about most of what he said concerning the painting, and has sold another painting over eBay where the buyer is threatening to sue him for fraud.
Reader Comments
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Not Surprised In The Least
That's probably not all this guy's up to -- I wouldn't be surprised if he's shill bidding on his own auctions. I haven't been able to see any clear pattern of that, but in addition to the two eBay names the news article mentions, a third "w." pulls its images from the same pacbell.net account.
And he's trying to finance his law practice. Doesn't that figure?
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Update
The id used to list the painting in question (golfpoorly) has been NARU'd by eBay, as has the other one mentioned in the NYT article (advice) and the one mentioned here (w.). So it seems that eBay is making an effort to keep deceptive users off its system and they should be commended for that.
However, I can't recall a single high-profile, big-ticket eBay auction that wasn't either turned into a circus or failed to live up to the hype. A charity auction for a BMW X5 had something like four times as many prank bids as real ones. All of the winning bids for Peter de Yager's Y2K domain name turned out to be bogus. In both cases bid amounts made headlines before they were discovered to be bogus. Now this, and I'm not even counting the obvious absurdities like Elian's raft. eBay has done very well for itself and its "community" with small, cheap items, but this virtually anonymous person-to-person model just isn't working for expensive items.
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