Expensive error sees Chinese man bid more than US$41,000 for used iPhone during online auction
Bidder insists he did not realise he was offering almost 100 times the going rate
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.
On Thursday morning, a court in Qinhuai, Nanjing, put up a used rose gold iPhone 7 with 128 gigabytes of storage for sale online, with the bidding starting at 100 yuan.
About 11 minutes after the auction started, the bidding price surpassed 10,000 yuan.
The authorities suspect a lot of online bidders started to push up the price of the phone as a joke.
After 708 bids, the phone was sold for 270,550 yuan to a man only identified by his last name Che, who later insisted he had misidentified the price tag and would not pay for the phone.
However, the incident still proved costly for him after officials summoned him to court and fined him.