Online auction participant has been fined in China for refusing to buy a second-hand iPhone for $41,000

Almaty. September 11. Silkroadnews – A court in China fined an Internet auction participant for refusing to buy a second-hand iPhone for a price of $41,000, South China Morning Post reported.
“A Chinese man who made a record bid of 270,000 yuan (US$41,660) for a used iPhone in a court auction has insisted it was all a mistake and he will not pay”, the report said.
It is explained that Qinhua, Nanjing, People’s Court put up for sale online the confiscated second-hand iPhone 7 with 128 gigabytes of storage with a starting price of 100 yuan. About 11 minutes after the start of the auction, the price exceeded 10,000 yuan.
Authorities suspect that many online bidders have begun to raise the price as a joke. After 708 bids, the phone was sold for 270,550 yuan to a participant identified as Che, who later stated that he misidentified the price and refused to pay. Nevertheless, he had to pay a substantial fine.
It is reported that the judicial investigation showed that Che was betting twice during the auction. According to Che, he thought that the price is only 2,000 yuan. As the publication notes, the new iPhone 7 with the same features costs more than 6,000 yuan, and the second-hand - about 3,000 yuan.
The court also summoned another bidder named Liu, who made 147 bids during the auction, but stated that he did it for the sake of joking and did not intend to buy a used phone at such a high price.
The court fined Che and Liu 10,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan respectively for obstructing justice, and stated that the search for other malicious bidders would continue.
According to the publication, the auctioned iPhone 7 had been confiscated from a debtor in the court case. Sale of confiscated goods through the online auction is a common practice of Chinese courts, “with the sales becoming one of their major sources of revenue”, the report said.