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Posted By: Paul Fusco

To all members of the forum. We offer a public apology to Steve. We have already apologized to him three times presonally and now we will do it on the forum. There was no attempt to deceive him nor any games played. The facts are simply this. We did not receive your fax Steve. Period. I know that you show a transmission on your end saying that it went through. It did not. Period. So we do not have it when the auction started and therefore could not exercise you bid of $2100 as we didn't know it existed. I understand that you are frustrated but if you wanted the piece that badly don't you think it would have been a good idea to pick up the phone to see if indeed we received your fax. Do you really think would have ignored a $2100 bid on a $1100 piece?? As far as the eBay live module goes, as auctioneers, we do not see the proxy bidding on eBay prior to the auction. Nor do we see any of the bids eBay has accumulated for each lot right up to the point where the lot opens. And only then do we what eBay tells us is the high bid that they have received in incremental form. When I first looked at the bid history after the auction when you made me aware of the situation, it did not show your bid. When I looked the again it did. It showed that the lot was sold for $675 with a three way tie between you and two other bidders. It also showed that our eventual winning bidder was on top with another bid hidden by an asterisk. When you made me aware of the situation and that your bid was $700 thru eBay, I called eBay to see what the problem was. The high bidder thru eBay was indeed the person that we awarded the lot to as his bid was in the four figure range. Had eBay live module been working right, which we did not know at the time that it wasn't, the high bidder actually should have gotten the lot for $725. So without your fax bid of $2100, WHICH WE NEVER RECEIVED, you would have not won the lot. Again, we apologize for the mishap but it not because of anything attempted deceipt on our part. As I told you via email, I would been more than happy to exercise your fax bid of $2100 if we had received it. My consignor would have been happier and you would have been as well. This was not a mistake or attempt to deceive you on out part. We called the winning bidder on your behalf and tried to get him to sell you the piece at a reasonable price. He was also looking for this piece for a long time so he refused. Steve, we did everything we could to make this right. We've apologized five times now. We did not attempt to deceive you or make a mistake by not enetering your fax bid. We simply did not receive it. I don't know what else to say. Since eBay has decided to suspend the live auction format at the end of the year, their support of their current platform has fallen off. We are currently talking to several companies to put the auctions on our website to avoid the hassles with eBay live.