SW KS, near Dodge City | Funacres - 10/20/2010 09:27 The "terms and conditions" do not state that a $1,000 advance payment must be made to qualify a bid. Here is what is printed: Qualifying bids and bidders
Bids over the amount of $10,000.00 are subject to Purple Wave's qualification process. Verification may include, but is not limited to, providing a bank letter of guarantee, credit references or credit card pre-authorization. Purple Wave may take any or all of these measures at any point during the auction. Purple Wave reserves the right to strike any Internet bid if the bidder refuses or fails to timely cooperate with Purple Wave's efforts to verify the bidder's qualification to bid.
As you can see, a requirement to post a $1,000 credit card payment isn't mentioned. In fact, under these terms, a credit card pre-authorization could be for any amount that PW should ask for. Also, there isn't any mention of holding it for 72 hours. Here is a portion of what was contained in their email to me: Per our terms and conditions, any bids $10,000 or greater will need to be accompanied by a bank letter of guarantee or credit ,or a deposit of $1,000.00 before the day of the auction. Currently, your max bids placed total $36,000.00. For your convenience I have attached a copy of our bank letter requirements. For bidder qualification purposes a check number is not necessary. If you are interested in putting down a deposit, please respond to this email and authorize your card on file to be charged. This deposit is 100% refundable if you are not a successful bidder for this auction. Deposits are refunded within 72 hours post auction.
What they have done is not consistant with a true bidder qualification since my bid should not be displayed until I am "qualified". Instead, they are using my bid which isn't a "qualified" bid to raise the bid amount, artificially increasing the auction price for others. As of this morning, bidder #69150 is still having to bid $13,500 more for the equipment than necessary because of this scam that is being perpetrated on him. How many times does that happen over and over? I'm personally not going to participate any more in this fraudulant scheme and I am warning anyone else that might want to know the truth. If you are a PW customer and happy with this process, bid high and bid often. If not, then you have been warned. One other thing, you can critisize me and ridicule me if you think that is a bright thing to do. I think you are stupid if you desire to defend such a fraudulant practice. It never ceases to amaze me how some will attack the one who is trying to help them learn and protect themselves. Now that I have provided the evidence through this thread, it is my hope that others will discover the same practice and stop supporting this method of doing business. Companies that intentionally use a fraudulant scheme should be left out to dry, making room for those that are employing honest and fair practices. So at this point they haven't struck your bid, probably b/c they're giving you time to meet their requirements, as they clearly state. They've given you approximately 24 hours to comply so far. Would you rather they give you 15 minutes to comply, that way you have no leeway? And to be honest, you placed your bid, turns out your bid isn't the highest, so why worry about all the payment verification process? At a live auction, if you were bidder #2 nobody would even take your number, much less worry about payment verification. I MUCH prefer the PW method rather than the bigiron method where you have to be pre-approved, w/ bank letters etc... That's a real pain for me. Essentially PW has said, we'll put our faith in the bidders actually being able to perform as they bid, rather than making them jump through 500 hoops to be qualified to bid. Then if they do have a high bid, we'll do the verification then, prior to that, it's simply a bunch of spinning wheels that in the end accomplishes nothing. I know I've had to have my banker fax bigiron letters probably 7 or 8 times. I've bought exactly 1 item from them. So, 10 minutes for me to call the banker. 20 minutes for him to type up and fax the letter to bigiron. Then another 10 minute call from me to bigiron to make sure I'm verified. At this point we're 40 minutes (2/3rds of a man-hour) in for 1 bidder, on 1 auction. 2/3rds of a man hour X say, 3000 bidders in an auction = 2000 man hours gone. Say there's 500 items in the auction, so 500 winners. 500 X 2/3rds man hours = 335 man hours actually needed. Soooo, 1665 man hours were wasted in my hypothetical example. What if they only required the high bidders to do this? Saves everybody a lot of time.
EDIT: Oh yeah, you could have just had your bank fax them the letter that you're good for it, just like I had to do w/ bigiron, then you wouldn't have had to provided the $1000 payment that you're hacked off about.
Edited by pknoeber 10/20/2010 10:04
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Beware of PURPLE WAVE
