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Bad Thailand Auction House

Thailand businesses are a bloody horror -- everyone knows that. But the weird thing is, the farangs (westerners) who start businesses there are about 14 grades LESS competent and professional than the Thais.

It's an enigma.

Bad Thailand Auction House
Thailand Auction House Sucks

This website contains and includes my
opinions and experiences.
This content is approved by my USA
First Amendment attorney.

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I really, really don't
like scammers.

There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of cases like this in Thailand, all begging to be exposed. No one person can take them all on. People have lives to live, after all. But you CAN take on the ones that get randomly dumped squarely in your lap, like a bird turd that you didn't see coming, and which becomes impossible to just brush away with a swipe of the hand, and then it becomes your civic duty to expose whatever truths you can find about the misdeed that has presented itself. To ignore it merely leaves it for someone else to become a victim of and to struggle with after the fact. Are you a member in good standing of your society, or are you a head-in-the-sand, blind, lazy lout?

Every once in awhile you run across a business SO stupidly run, SO obtuse, SO unprofessional, SO completely fucked up and inept, that it becomes your social duty to try to save your fellow man the experience. That's what reviews are for. This is a review.

Let's imagine you have a few things to sell because you want to leave a country you've been living in for a decade and the stuff isn't worth transporting 8900 miles back to your home in the USA.

Easy. Right?

Ah, you might think so.

In the US you can sell ANYTHING because PEOPLE HAVE MONEY. In SE Asia, no.

In any case you place some ads. The silly, loud, obnoxious, half-drunk looky-lou's come and pick through your stuff (sometimes stealing what they can) and make absurdly stupid offers, and you tell them to go away before you knock their Goddamned teeth out, and then you call an auction house to just get 'er done. It's an eminently simple piece of business that a damned ferret could handle smoothly. After all, IT'S WHAT THEY DO! Couldn't possibly be more straight-forward.

I did just that here in Thailand a week ago.

Here's how it went.

I made an inquiry to a local auction house. It took three requests to get their commission rate (mysteriously and conspicuously missing from their website), and two more requests over many days to get their pickup rate, then the conversation commenced as follows:

Auction House:
What did you have to sell please! small item or a large one.

Me (reply):
I have a double-recliner/sofa, big sony music station, big karaoke speaker with mics, cotton candy machine, new massage table, new large refrigerator, some camcorders, new tables and chairs, Oculus rift, new outdoor table and chairs, commercial diving full face masks, and much more. Are things selling AT ALL right now or is it dead like the rest of the world?

Auction House:
We have a large following also our live bidding site is very active on sale days. But the items you have described to me are now mostly outdated and would be sold with a very low reserve
Kind Regards.
Auctioneer _______________.
Telephone ______________

Me (reply):
The items I listed are all, except the Rift, less than one year old! But you say they are “outdated”. Would you explain that please?

NO REPLY

I had been to this auction many times with friends. They sell almost exclusively junk. In the US we have places like the Goodwill, Salvation Army, and many others; they receive donations from people of unwanted items and they sell them, and purportedly use the proceeds to help the poor. Well, the Salvation Army does it all superbly and they REALLY help the poor. The Goodwill? Not so much.

I developed a tiny dislike for and suspicion of this auction house years ago when I went with friends and began to hear stories, and that's all they were -- stories -- of shady, shitty dealing to customers and clients at the hands of this auctioneer. I really paid them little mind because people do tend to bullshit. Maybe some guy sends his guitar there, and it sells for half what he had hoped, so he bad-mouths the house forever. Well, as long as the auction was honestly and competently conducted, shut the fuck up. You lost money. When selling used items you will virtually always lose money. Suck it up and move on. Be smarter next time. People love (love) to bad-mouth pawn shops too, but they don't HAVE to accept what's offered. Don't like pawn shops? Don't go to them.

So I went into this deal with not much of a preconceived notion regarding this house. I had heard a lot of stories though, and so I was the tiniest bit wary. Where there's smoke there MIGHT be fire. I had watched this auctioneer and their manner was sure as hell obnoxious and off-putting -- never, ever "friend" material -- in fact, let's say "never, ever set foot in my home as a guest" material, but as long as they sell your crap, who cares? And crap is mostly what they sell there. I mean garbage-level crap, as though they'd robbed a Goodwill store in America.

This auction house in Thailand sells exactly that kind of junk. The vast majority of it is trash you wouldn't want in your home if it was free. It's mostly junk left over from greasy old sex-pats who've come here, drank themselves to death over the years, and their bar-girl girlfriends are trying to pawn it off to make a few baht before they go back home to Isaan.

I've never bid on nor purchased anything there. My friends have bought things; almost without exception their purchases ended up in the trash, and the things they sold, sold for literally pennies on the dollar. The reserves were always too high; the stuff was bona-fide worthless -- the exact same kind of stuff you put out on the curb in front of your house in the US with a big free sign and hope it goes away before the city comes and fines you. It was sometimes ancient garbage, really, masquerading as "antiques". Dusty, ripped, 30 year old divans with springs poking through, yellow-stained and torn clothing, broken chairs and badly-listing dining tables gouged up by who-knows-what over the decades, chipped dishes, bent old brass or even plastic trophies from God-knows-where or what or from whom. Cheap, rusty tools. Caved in fridges. Commercial coolers with the glass doors busted out that may or may not run anyway (no returns here, folks!). Motorcycles that won't start. Faded, broken garden gnomes. Little twisted mechanical things, the purpose of which was lost last century. Boxes of scarred up remote controls missing their battery covers that match up to WHAT, exactly? The depressing list goes on forever.

What I had to sell was all NEW within one year, all quite high quality, clean, never damaged, never repaired, and much of it purchased within a few months, except the Oculus Rift, which was two years old but like new because it was seldom used. It was, in a word, GREAT STUFF comparatively, and would have stuck out like a sore thumb in this rattle-trap old auction house. My items would have been the first things to go, straight across the board.

But this demented knob said my stuff was just too "outdated" to sell. Imbecilic comments like that from silly old fools just leave your head spinning. How in God's name did they ever get INTO business, and more importantly, how do they STAY in business? It's not a rhetorical question and I have the answer: It is because there is NO COMPETITION in this farang-rich region, so even fools and imbeciles can stake out a business that feeds off this element and their life's mistakes, and keep it going. Time for some SOBER, PROFESSIONAL competition, methinks.

Nearly every single farang-run business I come across here would be run to ground by competition in three months in the USA. Almost straight across the board, the businesses here are pathetic.

All the people I contacted regarding this rogue business had colorful, usually foul adjectives to describe the owner/auctioneer. But the one that was presented most commonly was "tosser". I had never heard the word and had no idea what it meant so I looked it up here.

As I said, I've seen this kind of low-level insanity in countless American businesses, but especially in Thailand and, honestly, all through SE Asia. I don't see it to nearly this extent anywhere else in the world. SE Asians just can't sell. I don't know why. Maybe it's genetic. Maybe it's laziness. Maybe lack of basic education. I don't know. I don't care. But I expected better from farangs. Unfortunately, most farang businesses here are worse. I struggle to understand or explain that.

I think, based on assessments from countless friends of this exchange with the auction house, that this conceited, silly old pecker was simply put off by the fact that I was forced to ask THREE TIMES for their commission rate, and TWICE as to the cost of their pickup service. I think this ticked the old buzzard off, and s/he simply decided to try and tick me off in return. Guess what -- it worked. Are ya happy now, ya dizzy old spud?

All but one of the locals I've canvassed about this counter-productive jackass say that's just the way s/he rolls, and always has, and that explains the vehement dislike for him/her universally across the province. S/he's a very well-known douche.

After this last message from the auctioneer, I set out to find out who this imbecile really was. I have thousands of contacts here and I canvassed about 150 of them. 149 said, basically, the individual was an incompetent twat and they hoped s/he died off quietly and soon, for the sake and betterment of the world. Exactly one, and only one, said s/he was a fine, sterling human being, and was never known to be a knob. So let's see: 149/1. Ok. Got it.

Still foolishly thinking this situation might yet be resolved, I emailed yet again as follows:

Me:
Please understand this exchange is public. I will politely ask you one last time to respond. I've had to ask every single question repeatedly. This is the last time I will do so. All of the things I listed are less than one year old, with the exception of the Oculus, which is two years old. You replied and said my items were "too outdated" to sell. Of course you have seen no pictures of these items, nor do you have even semi-detailed descriptions. I have politely and clearly asked you to clarify and explain your determination that my items are "too outdated". You have not replied. I suggest to you that it would be in your best interests to reply. Many people are awaiting a clarification.

There was never a reply, at which time I posted this page.

To reiterate, without seeing a single picture or inquiring as to age, condition, purchase price, asking reserve price, or any other detail, this fucking imbecile spits back the above response. I've asked him/her politely to clarify. S/he refuses to respond. Honestly, in Thailand, I have met almost exclusively only the absolute most unprofessional and obtuse farangs on God's Green Earth with only a very, very small handful of exceptions, and this person hasn't let me down.

Thai law is such that you can't name any business, no matter how absolutely stupid, dishonest, backward, detrimental to society or fucked up they are. It's Thailand's ANTI-First Amendment.

I swear, Thais are allergic to any truth or fact. The Thai government does NOT seem to understand that Thai society MUST have a means of warning itself against bad businesses. To deny Thai citizens the means of warning themselves against bad businesses, sentences each and every Thai National to a lifetime of being scammed and screwed and bamboozled and stolen from and victimized again and again and again and again by predatory and dishonest business concerns, and that's exactly what is happening across the Kingdom.

For God's sake, even trees and vegetation in a forest have developed the means to warn each other when dangerous insects come calling and killing their neighbors. Thai law explicitly prevents this necessary means of self-protection and actually imprisons, punishes and bankrupts those who attempt to warn their neighbors of predators in their midst. Way to go, Thailand. So smart. This kind of backwardness in so many aspects of Thai life becomes increasingly difficult to choke down.

Recently, a man booked a local hotel through a global and extremely famous booking service, and left a negative review after departing, and was.....wait for it.....JAILED, then fined, then made to pay compensation to the hotel. TRUTH, FACT, LOGIC -- none of those things have any legal bearing whatsoever on such a case in Thailand, and you are NOT entitled to your opinion, even if it is documentably born out by provable facts. A business might criminally go into your bank account and steal one million dollars. But if you catch them and call them out publicly, YOU WILL GO TO JAIL. The business will bribe itself out of the problem. But YOU will go to jail. Wait a minute -- this logic reminds me too much of the radical Left movement in the USA!

So, there must be some PERKS to living in Thailand, right? Not really. Not anymore. I'm done, as are millions of ex-pats here who were actually supporting huge swaths of the Thai economy. Enough insanity is enough. I'm on my way home, and apparently so is everyone else, because the farang areas are ghost towns and were quickly becoming that long before Covid-19.

The libel and slander laws in Thailand have always been barking-mad, but much more so since 2007 when they were revised and made far, far more strict and silly. They were originally more or less aimed at protecting the monarchy from criticism. ALL criticism. For ANYTHING. EVER. And that's an issue up to Thais. It's their country; not mine. But over the years the laws and interpretations of the laws got sort of morphed and bastardized and are now used by absolutely any business to shut down and silence any and all dissemination of BAD THINGS IT ACTUALLY AND PROVABLY DID DO, but doesn't want any new potential victims to know about.

Thais seem to think that protecting the scammers and thieves and con-artists and shyster-businesses from truth and fact is far preferable to protecting its citizens FROM THE BAD BUSINESSES. Well, as Forrest Gump might have said, Stupid is as Stupid Does.

The fallout of this is that I cannot reveal the name of this idiot "business" or it's obnoxious, unprofessional, counter-productive, jackass-twat of an owner.

Yet.

Once I'm back in the USA, which has long-cherished laws exactly and directly opposite of the Halcyonic Thai laws, and which I am professionally schooled in, I can and will add the name of the business right here at the top of this page, and make sure the page SEO is up to snuff to display this page right next to the owner's real page.

--Plus I can and will disseminate the name of the auctioneer, his/her home address, phone numbers, copies of his/her Thai business licenses, criminal records,, family roots, photos of him/her and his/her home, his/her business location, and absolutely anything else EXCEPT his/her US social security number -- which s/he doesn't have anyway.

All I wanted to do was sell a few items. Could have been SO GODDAMNED SIMPLE. But the absurdity of imbeciles who come to Thailand and start small businesses, often because they're too fucking inept to succeed in their own countries, has fropped that simple idea and I'm simply tired of it. You reach a point.....

People need to know who and what they're dealing with. People have a God-given RIGHT to know who and what they're dealing with so they can protect themselves from the louts of the world. Period. To silence truth and opinion-based-on-facts is absolutely, clinically insane and society as a whole suffers deeply and irrevocably from it.

In so, so many of these instances of truly backwards businesses around and around the world, I find the root cause to be alcoholism. I have no idea if that's the case here and I don't care. I am only reporting what I USUALLY find (90%) to be the cause of the problem.

To be continued.....? Yes.

 

UPDATE:

Since posting this page I've been inundated by personal contacts who have horror stories to tell about this auction house. People DO like to talk and gossip and bullshit and rant and exaggerate and even lie. I'll sort through the more credible of the claims as time allows, to look for documentation, affidavits (I'll pay for them), and other facts.

One account, however, is coming to me more prominently than any others, and it has to do with the auction of a Harley Davidson motorcycle (known to we sport bikers as "Hardly-Ablesons") in which extreme and profound skulduggery seems to have been afoot. I'm in the process of researching that one first, and I'll post what I know here, when I know it.

The basic jist of the story so far is that a UK man, an expat living in Thailand, had an emergency and needed to return home quickly. He needed money, and so he put his Harley Davidson motorcycle up for auction with this auction house. He supplied an appraisal of over one million baht.

The bike was delivered to the house, and on auction day, there were no bidders at all. --Except one.

Why were there no bidders?

Because the auctioneer had "accidentally forgotten" to include the bike in the public listing. As Gomer used to say in his southern US drawl, "well supraihse, supraihse, supraihse".

The one bidder who did show up, an "acquaintance" of the auctioneer, made one bid of 400,000 baht.

The gavel instantly slammed down.

SOLD!

The mysterious lone bidder paid and took it away, and sold it privately for close to one million baht.

Is this story true?

I don't yet know. But I really, really, truly hate, loathe and detest scammers, and I'm working on it. As a retired US Federal Narcotics agent, I still enjoy drilling down and down and down until the truth is finally exposed. It's like digging up dinosaur bones. It's slow, painstaking, often boring, with many false leads. But eventually you reveal the item you seek. And I love sworn affidavits, don't you?

I'm receiving dozens of similar stories, many of which sound as bad or worse than this one. So far, this one seems to offer the best chance of running to ground and proving. Time will tell.

If I die off, my family will finish it. I love good families.

This page is in flux.

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