I didn’t know that the drop-ship scam had extended to liveauctioneers.com, but I’m not entirely surprised. It’s been prevalent on eBay for a while now, usually with Japanese sellers who scrape pictures and descriptions from Yahoo Japan and post an eBay listing a Buy It Now price that’s a healthy markup over the YJ price.

The other thing I’ve noticed — unsurprisingly — is that auctioneers don’t necessarily have any idea what they’re selling. Here’s a link to a past auction (which is allowed, I hope) for what looked to me like a decent 145.022 Speedmaster from the ‘80’s:

https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/_2D148B391E

The auction house had described it as cal 3861, and assigned an estimate of $7,000 to $10,000. IIRC, bidding stalled at around $3k — $3,750 with the premium — which was certainly as far as I was willing to go.

 

Indeed. Since my original post I was able to find a liveauctioneers listing for a rather unique watch (1969 Seamaster COSMIC midsize) which is not the typical fare on those lots. Sure enough, I found a listing for this exact watch from a Japanese seller on Chrono24. (Not only were the photos identical, the watch has a third party bracelet that was unique and easily identifiable.) I purchased the watch from Chrono24 for a whole lot less than the auction sites were estimating. (The watch just came back from servicing and I'm super happy with it.) Amazingly, even after I had pruchased and received the watch, it still showed up in several lots on liveauctioneers.

 

This has been a helpful thread. I’ve seen some LiveAuctioneers auctions lately with Chrono24 watermarks on the photos, and some watches with no one “watching” but the bidding goes nuts at the last moment to inflated prices that make no sense

 

Sometimes the auction result is faked. There can be shill bidders. I would believe a very low price before a very high price.

 

The thing is that sites like Invaluable and LiveAuctioneers are now being flooded with - what I think - are dropshop items posted by the 2-3 auctionhouses (which they are not) as mentioned above

 

I'm not sure there's any incentive for liveauctioneers to change. They presumably make some money from the front-sellers, either a standing agreement to list items and/or a per-lot fee when an item sells (even if it sells to a shill). Seemingly they would only change if the bot sellers created enough reputational damage to hurt the business overall.