Thread: New Auction Scam!!!

I saw one of my auction buyers today at an auction. He is well known in the area as being a heavy hitter and is generally considered to be honest and respectable. Anyway, he bought a unit at an auction that looked really, really good. He paid $2,600 for it. When he started going through the unit, he discovered that the boxes were taped up but empty. He also found boxes filled with trash. He was really pissed and told the facility and auctioneer that something was wrong with this space. He later found out that two other auction regular buyers who partnered on spaces rented a unit, filled it with their junk and trash, dressed the unit up to look good, stopped paying their rent and allowed the facility to sell their space. These two guys only owed $900 in back rent and fees and received a check from the facility for $1,700 since it sold for more than what was owed on it.

This buyer is really mad and was asking me if storage facilities know that this is now happening. I told him that I had never heard of this before, however, with Storage Wars and other shows making a circus sideshow out of our auctions, I can see where this will happen more often. I would never allow this to happen since I go through the boxes, totes, etc., before the auction.

Has anyone else had this happen or have heard of this new scam??????

Hmm.

Have never heard of anything like that!

It poses a handful of questions -
If they came to rent a unit at your facility, would you rent to them? They may try this trick again and go delinquent on you, but then if their delinquent unit was going to bring this much money...hard to say. We put tenant names in our advertisements so those in the know would know better than to bid on it after something like this.
Do you offer to rent the winner rent the unit they just bought knowing this could happen to you?

Do you refuse to rent them a unit, now knowing they've done this?

Our auction rules state clearly that there are no implied guarantees, warranties or titles, and everything is bought 'as is' by visual inspection only. Does that cover this type of instance? I should think so, but then I'm not a lawyer...not even on television... :-)

WOW! What a can of worms. I’m not sure how I would handle the situation. I would probably start a SST thread “HELP”. Nobody would get any $$$ until I got thing figured out. Legally … They would just have to hold their breath.

Originally Posted by hurlco

Has anyone else had this happen or have heard of this new scam??????

Last year there was an ad on Craigslist about storage being cheaper than the dump. I just laughed it off as a joke.

Never heard of that situation, but the schemes that bad guys dream up never ceases to amaze me.

Thanks for the heads up on this.

I'm sure I saw another thread on here from last month that detailed the exact same thing at two sites ...

There was one Madman...even the mention of people putting empty boxes in a unit, writing attractive comments on the outside like "Grandpa's coin collection" or "Mikey's comic book collection" on the boxes....then waiting for the unit to go to auction and collecting the overage. I think there was an actual storage unit in Nevada where the tenants had done just that....filled up a big unit with empty boxes just to get the auction overage $$$.

WOW! This is the first I've heard of this but it makes since. We once had a guy bid on a unit with nothing but empty boxes but it only got to $500.00 and tenant was behind $900.00 I wonder if he was trying to pull this scam off?

Originally Posted by Madman

I'm sure I saw another thread on here from last month that detailed the exact same thing at two sites ...

It happened to us in November. I don't know if the "occupant" was an auction buyer, but he definitely knew the ropes. He dressed up the unit with a lot of empty boxes marked "antique___", "comics", "baseball cards", etc. All the boxes were empty. He actually showed up to the auction to see how much his unit sold for. My husband caught his friend actually trying to videotape the event. My husband wasn't hearing it and kicked him out.

In good faith to the buyer, we refunded the money, and considered it fraudulent by the occupant...