Ya all need to got west to Colorado and set in on aw cow or horse sale.   quite fun  my dad use to look at some of the buyers he could tell if the had any money,,,   he would say "all hat  n no cattle"

boats wrote on Jan 31^st, 2015 at 7:16pm:

I can tell you from personal experience, here in PA the state WILL get after auctioneers if enough people b-tch about them.
Case in point- A couple of auctioneers went together and started an auction house/antique co-op.
What they were doing was, telling consignors that an item only brought so much at auction ; which was usually noticeably less than what similar items were bringing elsewhere. They would pay the consignor, then they would either put the item on ebay or offer it for sale at another antique mall that they felt the consignors would probably not frequent.
In other words the consigned items never really "sold" ; they were bought by the auctioneers and never got offered at public auction.
This went on until some consignors got suspicious and had friends attend the sale to see what was actually going on. To their surprise, they never saw their items offered but the consignors still got paid as if their items got sold.
Then somebody did some checking and found out that the auctioneers were maintaining booths at other, out of the way antique co-ops and lo and behold, that's where the "sold" items were displayed for sale.
I don't think there was any jail time; but there were fines and these two guys had their licenses revoked, and I believe they were barred from ever doing auctions again; at least in this state.