It's sold until it is relisted. I have a hard time believing that this is money laundering given the unfeasible amounts involved.
I suppose, though at this point, I’m sort of impelled to keep a tab on this item’s bidding history [Fig. 1]; a tab open on the winning bidder’s page [Fig. 2]; and a tab on the seller’s currently listed items page (to see whether it gets re-listed and/or an untoward change in their feedback given to others).
item bidding history (a 1-day auction)
Figure 1.
winning bidder’s bid history page
Figure 2.
It would attract far too much attention.
It certainly attracted our attention!
In any case, this may very well have been one of those newbie mistakes of the winning bidder setting a ridiculously high max bid for proxy-bidding (like €50K), and another bidder, also a newbie mistake, tossing in a ridiculously high max bid (like €40K), resulting in the outcome above in Fig 1. It’s tough to know much more, given how this was a 1-day private auction.
By the same token, one would like to believe that when a bidder throws down such a high max bid, one actually
has the means to back that max bid — should the final sale price come to it. I’d love to see other auctions (on, well, pretty much anything) which share a bidding pattern much like the above, which closed without a hitch and positive, mutual feedback followed.
I bought a new Magic Trackpad on eBay, which did involve money laundering. The trackpad sold in an auction at £10 below the RRP and nobody else was offering discounts at the time. The package arrived directly from Amazon with a "gift" packing slip. Amazon was selling at full RRP at the time. Clearly, somebody was buying Amazon vouchers with dodgy money and laundering through eBay, leaving Amazon with a problem. I sent details to the Amazon fraud dept. but haven't heard since.
To lean against the idiom, there’s more than one way to skin a cat!
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