Not at all to defend, but just on the question of dollar loss, in any given case I would think it's difficult to truly know the effect of the shill bids, because unless they were placed at the very end, you don't know what the course of legitimate bidding would have been but for the shills. Just by way of example, suppose the high bidder wins for 1000, but if you take out the shills his bid would have been 800. You can't really say that's a loss of 200, because if the high bid had showed at 800, not 1000, someone else might have bid 900.
Indeed, the government did not pursue restitution, perhaps because of difficulties of calculation.
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https://www.jamesspaethartwork.com/
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Last edited by Peter_Spaeth; 05-03-2018 at 08:42 PM.
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