A Winning Nautiluso Bidder: Still No Record

We finally tracked down one of the buyers from the Nautiluso auction. Paul Sagerman is a collector in Tuscon, Ariz. He had purchased the LP: Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington on Riverside. It was an original pressing in near mint condition and the price was between $500 and $600. Sagerman was the one who had original filed the negative feedback on Nautiluso back on October 14 when he suspected that the auction was not legitimate. However, he withdrew the negative feedback after he learned that the seller would accept Pay Pal. So far, Sagerman has not received his record and has filed a dispute with eBay. Originally, Sagerman said he had planned to bid on about 20 records, but was concerned when the seller did not respond to his questions. “I asked for a scan of the label, a scan of the back cover and

he didn’t respond to any inquiries,” Sagerman says. “He did answer one question: I asked where he was and he said he was in Brazil. Also, some of the listings were filled with inaccuracies. I lost a night’s sleep over this and finally withdrew my bids the night before the auctions closed.” He did keep in the bid on the Monk LP and was the winning buyer.

Despite everything Sagerman is not fully convinced that the auction is a fraud. “I was told something was mailed out and he was able to give me a tracking number,” Sagerman says. “I spoke to another buyer and he also had a tracking number and was actually able to track down the item. However, it was rejected in customs and sent back to Brazil. I couldn’t find anything with my tracking number.” I asked Sagerman why he believes he may still get his record. “It doesn’t make sense to me that the guy is a total fraud. He had a lot of feedback on eBay. He’s sold valuable classical records before and he sold a nice jazz record a few months ago and got good feedback on it. Yet, he’s a German seller and all of a sudden he pops up in Brazil. That’s odd.” The bigger problem is that the record hasn’t arrived and, from the looks of things, none of the records has arrived. It’s been about 45 days since the auctions closed and there has been no feedback from anyone indicating that a single record has been received by a single customer. We placed a call in to media relations at eBay and spoke to someone who said she would pose our questions to the powers-that-be there and get back to us, hopefully sometime tomorrow. Meanwhile, stay tuned.