$500,000 spelling mistake!!!!

[mmerlinn]

[ ]
This is hilarious and underscores the importance of proper spelling.

2 September, 2007 It's a brave new world out there, and one can easily underestimate the skills required to make full use of the internet. Here's one example that's sure to illustrate the importance of basic internet trading savvy, and tickle your sense of schadenfreude - an eBay trader who leveraged the mistake of another to make himself a tidy US $500,000 profit, for a small amount of work.

The item in question is a bottle of Allsopp's Arctic Ale - brewed in 1852 for an expedition to the Arctic led by Sir Edward Belcher. The ale had the special qualities of a freezing point well below zero degrees, and antiscorbutic properties vital for the period.

The initial seller made a vital error - he misspelt the name of the brewery as Allsop's, rather than the correct Allsopp's. This meant that an eBay user executing a search for Allsopp's would not find the auction. One eBayer who recognized the value of the item managed to locate the auction - either by luck, or more likely, a tool such as Auction Intelligence which searches for common or obvious misspellings of words.

With the greatly diminished competition resulting from the inability for normal searches to find the item, his bid was only the second to be placed, and he subsequently won the auction for US $304. He then re-listed the item on eBay, this time with the correct spelling. The auction received 157 bids, and the winning bid was a whopping US $503,300.

The moral of the story is, if you have something of undisputed value such as a museum quality bottle of beer from 1852, you'd best quadruple-check your spelling before listing it on an auction site where you have no legal grounds to deny the sale to the winning bidder.

Quoted from

http://www.gizmag.com/go/7929/

mmerlinn

"Political correctness is the BADGE of a COWARD!"

 

[ESquared]

At $500,000, it's surprising the seller didn't refuse to complete the transaction. That's a lot of money--enough to risk even a few legal problems on ebay. And for something worth that much, not choosing an appropriate reserve was foolish. In fact, this story sets off my "urban legend alarm bells" but perhaps I am wrong.

The $304 auction
The $503,300 auction

Despite the auctions being out there, for some reason this is still setting off my myth detector.

It would be trivial for someone to sell the bottle to himself as an advertising stunt intended to jack up the price at a future sale.

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[BobRodes]

Mine too.

From

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000541879&start=80:

I am Mike Peterson, seller of the 1875 Arctic Ale. I am also formerly newsletter editor of the newsletter of the Association of Bottled Beer Collectors. While it is impossible from a photograph, to say with certainty whether the 1852 Arctic Ale is a fake, I am sure it is.

Labels were rarely put on bottles in the 1850s, they were just coming into use. The label states that the 'red hand' is a trade mark. This trade mark was not registered until 1878.

The bottle looks wrong. It looks like one manufactured around 1880 to 1920 or so.

The wax seal is inappropriate for a bottled beer which has to survive Arctic conditions. A corked bottle with a lead seal is the only effective method of sealing against Arctic conditions available in the 1850s.

I hope that helps.

Also, according to

http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/1067017,

the buy it now option was 150k, and the high bidder made the $500,000+ bid while that option was on the table.

And this looks pretty authoratitive, from

http://www.antiqueweek.com/ArchiveArticle.asp?newsid=550:

Sale of Allsopp’s Artic Ale falls flat; bottle didn’t sell at $503,300

By Robert Kyle
There’s nothing worse than a flat beer on a summer day. The full bottle of historic Allsopp’s Arctic Ale sold Aug. 12 on eBay for a record $503,300 is now filled with empty promises. The auction had many bogus bids, leaving the seller holding the bag – and the bottle.

As AntiqueWeek reported on Aug. 20, the still-capped container was first purchased on eBay on June 21 by a Tulsa, Okl., man whose eBay user name is collectordan. He bought the bottle from a new eBay user in Lynn, Mass., for $304. That seller said it had been in his family "for generations."

Collectordan researched the bottle and realized he had an important artifact of British Arctic exploration history. The Allsopp’s ale had been brewed in 1852 especially for Sir Edward Belcher who added a quantity of the ale to his ship’s cache of provisions for a two-year quest to find the lost ships and crew of Sir John Franklin.

Belcher didn’t find Franklin and this reporter was hitting a few icebergs himself. Because the seller lives in Tulsa, I asked Wayne Greene, city editor of Tulsa World, to look into it. He assigned a young reporter, Althea Peterson. I had exchanged emails with collectordan but after the auction he was flooded with requests for information and our communication stopped.

Peterson was able to resume where I left off. Her story on the bottle appeared in the Aug. 28 issue of Tulsa World. Here’s what she found out:

The bottle is owned by Daniel P. Woodul. He is 25 and CEO of Sebris International, a company whose "primary goals are project facilitation and management in the Middle East." Its website was not operating at press time.

"After winning the aged bottle [on June 21], Woodul said he decided to appraise its value by re-auctioning it off," wrote Peterson. He told her, "I just sat back and waited. You wouldn’t believe all the emails I’ve received."

Here are more excerpts from her article:

"’The thing that really bothered me was people were contacting the original seller and basically coming down on this guy, calling him an idiot," Woodul said, noting that the original eBay seller had the bottle in his possession for 50 years. "Buying and selling is such a fickle thing. Sometimes you just don’t have the time to research what something is worth.’"

"Woodul isn’t expecting to cash a half-million dollar check anytime soon," Peterson wrote. "The bidder, known as v00d004sc0re on eBay, called him the night the auction ended. ’No hard feelings,’ Woodul said."

"’I talked to him the evening of and he basically said he wasn’t going to follow-through. He came out up front and said his bid was a joke bid.’"

Reporter Peterson said Woodul told her the bottle now rests in a safety deposit box. "He currently has no plans to sell it or even relist it on eBay, despite six-figure offers for the bottle," she reported. Woodul told her he may donate it to charity.

As for the fake high bidder, a resident of Somerville, Mass., and the subject of an article in the Somerville News for winning such an historic item, he has emerged unscathed and continues to buy and sell on eBay.

eBay said in the Aug. 20 article that all winning bids are "legal contracts" which, if not honored, may be subject to "legal action." There is no indication Woodul will seek punishment or damages against his half-million dollar prankster.

 

[AnotherHiggins]

Good BS meters, guys. Though I do personally know a guy who got a camera from ebay for a good price because the seller had misspelled it. But he saved considerably less than $500,000.

Reminds me of thread1256-1265552

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[Dollie]

Well, I don't know about you guys, but with the holidays coming up, I'm going to be searching for paystations, zboxes and ipogs!

I also did a little test by searching with a portion of the word on a $Major search engine. Searching for "budw" resulted in budweiser, budwiser, budwieser, etc. I also found that there are companies that specialize in finding misspelled auctions, and they'll be happy to provide you with links to them.... for a fee.

Heck, I'll just watch hubby type, I'll get all sorts of misspellings that way!

 

[AnotherHiggins]

From the article:

One eBayer who recognized the value of the item managed to locate the auction - either by luck, or more likely, a tool such as Auction Intelligence which searches for common or obvious misspellings of words.

(emphasis mine)


How much do you want to bet that this was a publicity stunt by that very company?

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[Thadeus]

How much do you want to bet...

Well John, how about I wager $500,000.00?

Sincerely,
v00d004sc0re