Lawsuits against auction.com are coming, and there will be class action lawsuits and individual lawsuits, and it is going to be one big legal mess. If you think auction.com is a pure auction site for real estate and foreclosures and short sales, think again. What many of us believe is fraud is now common practice at auction.com, and it has come to light that auction.com is anything but a transparent and honest auction service for real estate.
Lawsuits Against Auction.com
There are many legal issues that may involve consumer fraud, but perhaps the biggest fraud against ordinary consumers like you and me is a shock to investors when they first find out. Did you think that if you bid on a property on auction.com that you were bidding against other buyers or investors and that it was an open and honest auction? Oh, how wrong you would be.
It turns out you may be bidding against yourself in one of the biggest multi-billion dollar frauds this retired real estate lawyer has ever heard of. I run a real estate brokerage and periodically work with buyer clients to purchase properties on auction.com, but we have discovered we are not the only ones who have gotten caught by auction.com’s fraudulent auctions.
Auction.com appears to have software programmed to run the bids up even if there are no other bidders! Not only have investors discovered this all over the country and they are complaining, but auction.com actually admits this on their website with this language. I believe this language is an admission that will spur on lawsuits against auction.com.
Until the seller’s reserve price is met, Auction.com may counter bid on behalf of the seller. Counter bidding gives buyers and sellers more flexibility to find a mutually agreeable price. Counter bids do not occur after the seller’s reserve price is met.
That means you will be bidding against yourself! Can you believe their bold admission? Their statement that this process of you bidding against yourself “gives buyers and sellers more flexibility to find a mutually agreeable price” is incredible nonsense. Here’s what they should have written, “Counter bidding allows auction.com to create a false bidding process whereby you bid against yourself and keep running the price up while you bid again and again against yourself.” As if that isn’t bad enough, auction.com states it will not pay a real estate agent’s regular commission, but after you win the bid (bidding against yourself), they will tack on a 5% fee that the buyer also pays (in addition to the fee they are charging the seller).
Forget the reserve price. Auction.com does not post or reveal the reserve price on any property, and I have clients who insist that the fake bidding continues long after the reserve price was met (as they later find out what the reserve price was). This means that when you bid on a property, the software is apparently entering a higher bid to get you to bid against yourself. Of course, auction.com plays games with words, because they call it entering bids on behalf of the seller, but that is total nonsense. That would not be an auction at all. Does anyone else see a problem with a site called auction.com that is not a real auction?
Lawsuits Against Auction.com
You will find plenty of complaints on the Internet if you do a Google search, but I do not recommend bidding for properties on auction.com without a great deal of expert knowledge on investing in real estate and intimate knowledge about the auction.com process. Do not get caught in this consumer trap for the unwary. I believe lawsuits against auction.com are coming.
Last Updated on October 14, 2014 by Chuck Marunde
They sold a property to me. They said it was occupied by the owner or tenant. Was told all information will be made known once we closed. Come to find out the place was illegal occupied by multiple unknown persons. The whole house was not in any leave-able condition. It was a total scam. They bid against you to get the most out of you. Didn’t mind that, but deceiving information. They need to be sued and out of business. We were mislead.
Christel C Martens
Dear sir,
I paid for years on my home and property through wells fargo. They sold my loan to another company without my knowledge which caused my payments to go up and i had made payments to the bank in cash which were not forwarded. Wells fargo never forwarded them. I complained about that because it caused me to fall behind on my mortgage at the time of the loan being sold.
I was in the process of receiving money which i was gonna use to pay off the house and fix it up. During that time I was told to discontinue making my monthly payments because everytime I did they had to restart the calculations for the final bill when i paid off my property. I kept waiting for them to get in contact with me but before they did auction.com evicted me. Now when you get evicted your not allowed to buy your property back. I found a lawyer and went through a different brokerage company to see what I could do. In the long-run it came back to me that yes i had been telling the truth. Specially when it came out that wells fargo was committing fraud and a bunch of lawsuits started popping up against them. But in the mean time I was still living in my suburban with my pets. I needed surgery which was planned but they did not want to do the surgery as long as I was living in the vehicle. So needless to say that did not get done. The real estate company i was using also discovered that auction.Com had people working for them that were wanted by the FBI.
Finally my new real estate company got everything they needed and were allowed to help me get my house back. They wanted over 40.000 dollars which was the original amount i had bought the property for. I made a bit closer to the amount i would have had to pay had none of this happened. But nope they would not take it because someone was suddenly bidding against me. While the whole time the real estate company has been told the was nobody bidding against me. After a lot of hassle and treats i gave in and agreed to pay the full price again plus closing costs and all other costs.
I’m the mean time the person working for auction.com was in and out of my house and a lot of stuff was loaded in his vehicle. I caught him the first time and the stuff was taken back into my house. Well i couldn’t sit on my street to watch from a distance because I was treatened jail time, so in the long-run they were cutting the grass late in the day, then packing up when it was dark and somehow a lot of my personal items disappeared. I discovered most of this after i was allowed back on the property. And was told the day of being allowed back in and on my property that the person working for auction.com came up the day before to get their property off my property has discovered my place had been robbed. They had turned it in to the cops because they had found a pistol on the floor in my bedroom. (That pistol had been in plain sight the whole time because I always had it on my dresser next to the bed). And they told the cops entry was made through the front door. They had busted in the little window and opened the door that way. Well appearantly the cops had taken them at their word and when they went with me to my property after i finally had everything done told me about this.
I finally had to point out to them if someone breaks in and breaks a window all the glass should be inside the house with maybe a couple small pieces outside. Instead all the glass was outside. Like they just busted the glass themselves after panicking because I was getting my house back and in the mean time they had plundered the whole property off everything worth money. They even took my cast iron pans and skillets and stuff. And i had a lot of them. Electric heaters. Money they found i had hidden and a whole lot more. When i replaced not even all of the items that were gone it costed me over $20.000 dollars. So besides all the costs buying the place back i was up to almost $70.000 dollars already and still rising. That little joke cost me almost my whole settlement i had received for things not related to this mess.
I was also told that the taxes and everything would be taken care off upon completion off buying my property back.
I had been charged for it and they would take care of it.
In the mean time I had the property back but I’m still having nightmares and panic and anxiety and have to see a therapist to help me deal with all of this. Then today i happened to scan the internet for things when i discovered there’s a lean on my place and auction.com is missing my house again because taxes have not been paid.
I cannot deal with this anymore and I’m at a kids of what to do. I’m still catching up on things related to that wrongful eviction almost 3 years ago. And auction.com appearantly is still screwing with me.
When I tried to find help with the first problem everytime companies and people discovered i was dealing with auction.com they suddenly were not able to help me anymore.
Is there some way you can help me. I only write down the basic things that happened but there was much much more that happened in those three months that is still haunting me.
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Christel C. Martens
I have invested in Real Estate for over 4 years and never have i ever had anyone scam me.
In September my daughter and I decided to move from rural North Dakota and find the place of our dreams in rural Kentucky. A place not to far from Nashville would have been the perfect dream. In late September we found the house … the one catch we had to go through Auction.com in order to purchase because the house went to foreclosure.
Nevertheless, we put up the 2500 which is what they require in order to bid. We decide to take a trip and view the property… we witnessed the lock box had been cut, the toilets were removed… the back porch looked as if someone was showing to repair them.
The disclosure stated that the house had been winterized … upon winning the scam bid system as we were feeling at the time that Auction.com was bidding against us we honored our commitment to owning the house relying upon the disclosure statement for information about the home. We tried to look in the basement and make sure the pipes had not been removed also to see what heating system was in place… the steps to the basement had been kicked out or removed so that no one could attempt to inspect the basement. After winning the bid we paid for the house and loaded our Uhual for our new life. It was with high expectations that we hoped the disclosure information pertaining to the home would be an honest assessment.
Once we arrived at our new home we found the back of the porch was totally demo-ed … the steps still removed… the walls graffitied… the swimming pool cover removed and replaced with a cheap plastic cover Which is now at the bottom of the pool covered with debris.
Getting along with life I have the electric inspected and the power turned on… then comes the water… all pipes were broken, despite Auction.com noting that it had been winterized, it was clearly noted on our disclosure statement.
Now comes plumber #1 total rip off man… within 3 days he pulled 1200 out of my pocket and did one pipe. Once I realized he was not coming back anytime soon I wrote him off as a bad experience. Plumber #2 inspects the missing steps and replaces them. Long story short it’s a HOT mess.
After pondering the situation and 6000 in hotel bills we have been in a hotel since the week before Thanksgiving. Finally I decide to contact Auction.com so they may assist me in contacting the seller.
The girl at Auction.com sent me pictures of the winterization and the pool cover being replaced and the back porch demo…. with a statement that the property management team contracted by Wells Fargo who is the seller found it unsafe for me to acquire the property with a rotten beam under the porch, she claimed the steps to the basement had also been replaced. We know that is a lie because the plumber couldn’t even get in the basement safely until he replaced them. This company is full of lies, I was sent an email today stating that the seller states I signed a document that I was accepting the house as is… the contradiction here is I have not even acquired a property in the condition it was in when I viewed it in late September. I sent stamp dated photos of our time at the property prior to the purchase we then received an email stating that we shou,d have done due diligence and that the customer service rep with Auction.com did not want me to bother her anymore.
This company is a rip off place.
I am hiring a lawyer I will also with every breath in me form a petition for a class action lawsuit.
Well, dummy, that is exactly how Reserve auctions work. Seller sets minimum price they will accept and until minimum is met bets increase. Nothing to sue for here. You will be kicked out of court as soon as you start and state their site rules.
Very informative blog about pre settlement funding. Thank you for sharing it with us and please keep sharing it with us.
Are there any existing class action lawsuits that I can enter. I just got scammed by auction.com and paid over MARKET price for a fixer-upper thanks to their shill bidding
Steven, I don’t have access to a database with lawsuits pending against Auction.com, if any, but I recommend a Google search with various phrases.
how can i file a class action lawsuit on auction.com
ANSWER: You’d have to hire an attorney certified to file a class action lawsuit.