Category: News

New Ella, If You Can Find It

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Have you read about the newly discovered and newly released Ella Fitzgerald Boxed Set from 1961 and 1962? It’s called Twelve Nights in Hollywood and it features 76 songs recorded at the Crescendo in Los Angeles. I read the article in The New York Times on Sunday and was pretty excited and I was a little down today and I figured, well, what could be better on a down day than Ella. There are plenty of places that sell CDs near where I live — I’m in the New York metropolitan area, so really, they’re all over the place, or at least they used to be. And it’s Christmas shopping season, so every place should be fully stocked, right? Well, so far I’ve called six different stores and not a single one is carrying this item. Zero. They all told me to go online and I could get free shipping. So why bother having a retail store at all?

In Nautiluso Case, PayPal May Be The Biggest Loser

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Brian makes an interesting point in his comment in the article on the buyers filing $30,000 in claims against Nautiluso. He notes in the earlier fraud that emanated from Italy, most, if not all, of the buyers were made whole by PayPal. He mentions a maximum of $2,000, but I think there actually is no maximum. I spoke to one of the Nautiluso buyers yesterday who spent more than $2,000 and was fully reimbursed by PayPal and was asked not to talk about it, so I won’t mention his name. We also heard from one of our readers that he has already been reimbursed by PayPal. The challenge for organizations like eBay and PayPal is that their business model is predicated on creating a safe buying and selling environment, so something like this poses a major challenge to them. At the end of the day, they don’t want the negative publicity Read more

Still Waiting For Answers on Nautiluso

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No major new updates on Nautiluso. I spoke to media relations at eBay again this morning and posed a bunch of questions, such as: Is eBay ready to declare this a fraud? If so, are they pressing charges and, if so, where? What about the probable victims — who gets protected and who doesn’t? It will be interesting to see how they respond. I’m hoping to speak to someone directly in eBay corporate, no offense to the media relations person who is quite nice and friendly. I haven’t seen any new complaints or negative feedbacks on the eBay profile of Nautiluso, but they haven’t pulled it down yet either, so that’s a good thing, since it is a place we can keep monitoring events if eBay is not forthcoming with information. I did notice that Nautiluso doesn’t have any items posted this week.

Buyers File $30,000 in Fraud Claims Vs. Nautiluso

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In the past two days five buyers have filed 21 instances of negative feedback against Nautiluso and have indicated in their feedback posts that they have filed claims with eBay. The actual number of records involved was higher — 24 records in total — because some of the feedback actually registered as positive, accidentally we presume. You can check out the feedback comments here, but here are some samples:

“Buyers be aware! 10/10 jazz auction was a mere fake; you’ll never get your recs!”

“Never received the record. No communication from seller. Claim filed with Paypal”

“Never received the item, filed claim with Ebay and Paypal…”

“Records never delivered. There is not a response at all either.”

If those comments are not bad enough here is the piece de resistance, from a classical buyer:

“The contents are 100% different Useless trash Search with Q123Q word.”

So the assumption on that last buyer is that he received a package from Nautiluso, probably timed to arrive after the 45-day time limit for filing a claim with eBay, and the contents of the package were not relective of those that he had won on the auction. We’ll do more reporting on this later today and tomorrow, but so far the tally is as follows:

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eBay Responds To Nautiluso Questions (Sort Of)

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If we’re going to get to the bottom of the Nautiluso case, eBay is probably not going to be all that helpful, based on the initial response from their public relations people to our inquiries. We posed a few questions and actually had hoped to speak to someone directly at eBay, but we wound up talking to a PR person from an outside firm and she relayed the questions and relayed the responses. We’ll follow up again after the Thanksgiving holiday. Meanwhile, this is what eBay has to say about Nautiluso:

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A Winning Nautiluso Bidder: Still No Record

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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

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Nautiluso: Starting To Assess The Damage

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I just looked back again at the records we were watching from Nautiluso and the numbers are staggering. Here are some of the prices that we recorded:

Hank Mobley, Blue Note 1568: $3,805

Sonny Clark, Cool Struttin’, Blue Note 1588: $3,750

Tina Brooks, True Blue: $3,249.99

Jutta Hipp With Zoot Sims: $3,242.99

J.R. Monterose, Blue Note 1536: $2,247.22

Tommy Flanagan Overseas: $2,247

Bill Evans, Waltz For Debby: $1,500

Hank Mobley, Blue Note 1540: $1,705

Lou Donaldson, Quartet, Quintet, Sextet: $1,175

That’s a total of about $23,000 for just nine records. Perhaps these were the ones that sold for the highest prices but, still, with 75 jazz records that week, you could still be looking at $60,000 or more. Maybe it’s not Bernie Madoff territory, but in our little world of Jazz Collectors it is quite a score if, indeed, the records don’t exist.

No, No Nautiluso: Buyer Opens Claim With eBay

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A couple of readers have already pointed this out in various comments: The feedback is starting to come in on Nautiluso and it is not very promising. One buyer has issued two feedback reports, stating the same thing: “Records never delivered from Oct. 16 purchase . Have opened claim with eBay.” Both of these claims were for classical records, but the notes are ominous, as is the fact that so far there has been zero feedback from the huge jazz auction we were watching: Nothing at all. If you go back to our original report on this alleged Jazz Vinyl Collection, we had pinpointed about 75 records, in pristine condition, all among the rarest of the rare in the world of jazz collectibles: Jackie McLean on Ad-Lib, Tina Brooks True Blue, Hutta Hipp on Blue Note, and many, many more. We were somewhat skeptical and many visitors to Jazz Collector

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A Disaster on eBay?

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Please tell me this problem is only happening to me. For many years I’ve had a very specific search for jazz records. It was quite simple: Records, Jazz, 33 RPM. Typically, there would be 300 or so pages of 50 items each during any given week, 15,000 or so items. This was where I would browse and where I would sort and search. This morning I clicked onto my bookmark and, suddenly, without warning, it was GONE! The search took me directly to the overall records category — 6,400 pages and 320,000 items, most of which I could care less about. I went back several times to try to get my original search back and, nope, no way, it is not there. I went back to the eBay home page and tried to find it and, nope, no way, it was gone — no way to search through the jazz records, or to list the jazz records separately as I always have. I did do a search with the word jazz and it narrowed the list down to 22,000 items, but it included 78s and 45s and all other categories of jazz, and there was no way I felt comfortable that this would have all of the 12-inch jazz records I would have seen under my traditional search. Please tell me that I’m doing something wrong and eBay hasn’t made a monumental error in how it lists jazz records. Please, please, please. If that is not the case, and eBay has really made this change in how it lists jazz records, it could be a disaster to those of us who have come to value eBay as a means to both buy and sell records. It would take away the efficiency of what we do and the fun and the sense of community. What could they possibly be thinking?

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