Proctor Journal

The $10,000 bid for a motorized chair made famous by being involved in a DWI accident did not materialize.

The bidder for the motorized lounge chair emailed the Proctor Police to say, “whoops”. Clayton Adler wrote: “To whom it may concern. There seems to be a mistake. I did not mean to bid this amount and I can’t afford it.”

His bid was $10,099.99.

Adler, 24, is a vice president of ExecTech in Cupertino, CA. Up until the auction, he had a 100 percent positive feedback. “I guess he lost that rating,” Proctor Police Chief Walter Wobig said.

Adler said his bid was definitely a mistake. “I truly apologize,” he stated. “I thought I had bid $1,500. Next thing I know, I must have bid $15G’s It must have been under automatic bid.”

“I have been a ebay user for long time and I have never done any thing weird. I really apologize,” he added.

Adler said he heard about the chair from a friend who heard about it on a gossip site.

Adler’s bid was the only one he made on the chair. It was made 28 hours before the bidding ended. Forty-one bidders placed 64 bids during the three-day auction.

Wobig said he would contact the next highest bidder to see if they are interested. That bid was for $9,999.99.

This is the second set-back for the City of Proctor. Within hours before bidding was scheduled to end, La-Z-boy, apparently upset that their name was being associated with a police auction, got eBay to remove the item, though they claim that was not their intention.

Bids for the motorized chair reached $43,500 thanks to international media attention. Forty-eight bidders made 96 bids. Over 120,000 had viewed the auction and over 7,000 were watching the action.

The chair was relisted, but the bidding frenzy never came close to the first effort.

Proctor’s plight is the latest fraudulent bidding on eBay.

Two years ago a $10 million bid was made for the ‘Dukes of Hazard” car was a fraud. Two months before that it was a 40-year-old acetate of ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ by Andy Warhol. It reached $155,401. Before that it was a gas grill claimed to be owned by then Red Sox Manny Ramirez that reached $99,999,999.

An eBay spokesperson told the New York Daily News that it does not keep track of how many winning bidders renege.