Mastro or Memory Lane

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Posted By: JK

With respect to a lawsuit, it seems to me that if a consignor and a friend conspired to shill an auction and the shill bidder refused to pay, it would be highly unlikely that there would be a lawsuit. Before I explain why, I have not reviewed the bidder's agreement with the auction house - so I dont have all the terms in front of me to state this with certainty. That said, in reality, the auction company is only going after the bp. Rarely, if ever, is a 15 or 20% bp going to be enough to justify the expense of a lawsuit. A 10k item is still only going to have a 2k bp - hardly worth the expense of a lawsuit in my opinion. Heck, unless you have collection attorney's working on percentages of your recovery, even a 20k bp is going to be hard to recover without fees eating into most of the recovery. Now, if there were a way to recover attorney's fees, perhaps lawsuits do become more of a possibility.