Complaint Review: platinumequineauction.com

I should have known that there would be cheating in this auction because I had seen it first hand at many of the other auctions I had gone to in person. Just like the other person on here who told their story about how they had seen the fake bidding at Premier Horse Sales and Cowgirlcadillacs. I assumed that since it was online that there was no way the seller could see my bid amount that I put in on the site, but as I watched the bids keep going up I became nervous at first that I wasn’t going to win the auction, but my nervousness turned to sickness when the bidding stopped and the last person had just pushed me right up to what my maximum bid was. So I don’t know how much I actually should have paid for my horse, but certainly much less than I actually did. 

I could have chalked it up to coincidence, but after doing some more research and talking to other buyers that had bought horses at Platinum as well as horsebid.com and magichorseauction.com and others, I discovered it was a pattern and tactic used by all these sites. All of these people that run the sites and most of the repeat regular sellers are all buddies and basically go from sale to sale recirculating many of the same horses looking for that one naïve buyer that really wants that one horse. There is no true market dictating the price because they simply find what that one buyer is willing to pay and find a way to get it out of them using an intricate series of fake bidding names. When I looked closer at the bidding history (they’ve closed this flaw in their sites now, and are hiding the bidding history) I noticed that it was always the same usernames that were coming in second or third place and driving up the winning bidder that had set a prior maximum bid amount they were willing to pay. So I came to the only rational conclusion that either the sellers were all hacking into the system somehow to find out the information, or the more likely conclusion that the people running these sites were in on it conspiring with the sellers and cheating me and other buyers. I had some other people help gather some of the information on other horses that had sold under the same circumstances and made copies of the actual auction results and combined those into the attached spreadsheet with some of those results. There are tons more of examples, but these give a pretty clear picture of what’s going on. Some of the sellers like Ellesse Schwartz, Beaver Ranch, Buster Horses, SKC Livestock, Circle PB Horsemanship, and others you can see have repeated horses with the same losing usernames bidding on them running up the price on the winning bidder.

So the bottom line, I did receive the horse I was bidding on. And no, he was definitely not the way he was portrayed in the video I watched. That’s a chance I was willing to take by buying a horse at an auction. I was not and am not okay with the fraudulent tactics that took place to basically steal my money.

This cancer in the horse world is spreading even faster now, these auction sites are using social media and advertising on legitimate sites like dreamhorse.com , ehorse.com , equinenow.com , equine.com , and others to drive traffic to their auctions. Please spread the word to any of your horse friends and let them know what’s going on and to be careful on sites like this. If enough people are educated and complain hopefully at least it will save some people from being cheated. Hopefully law enforcement will take some action as well and stop these criminals.