[Overpaid Slacker]

I've seen three of these "low low price" and "Pre-approved bidders only" auctions in the last couple of months.

They're bunk, plain and simple.

My fave was a listing in Schenectady (near Albany, NY) for a great, late-model pick-up at a very attractive price. I sent a request to be pre-approved, and mentioned that I'm only a couple of hours away and would like to drop by.

Silence. So I ran the VIN and it came up clean - in Washington State; including mileage within 300 miles of the what the auction said (and this is not a vehicle you'd pay to ship x-country), so the vehicle had made it 3000 miles showing only 300 on the odo.

After the auction, I got an email very similar to madmmac's, but my guy had shipped out to Thailand, which is why he didn't get back to me during the auction (a surprise trans-oceanic re-lo; you know, it's happened to all of us). The car was in storage in WA... blah blah blah.

Oh, and his 10 prior auctions were all for small items in the last few months.

JP