Mushy bat auction stopped due to fake bidding

The auction of Bangladesh wicketkeeper-batsman Mushfiqur Rahim's bat to raise funds for the coronavirus pandemic has been halted for the time being due to fake bidding on Tuesday.

Mushfiqur, who scored the first ever double century in Tests for Bangladesh against Sri Lanka back in 2013, had decided to put up that bat up for auction to raise funds for coronavirus affected people on May 9 and the auction was expected to end on May 14.

Mushfiqur's management company NIBCO made a deal with Pickaboo.com, an e-commerce site, where the bat was placed for auction but on Monday the auction was halted from 3:30 PM.

Until Tuesday, there were 53 bids, with the price exceeding Tk 41 lakh for the bat where majority of those were fake bidders with fake names. 

"We are hoping to start it any time soon. This is unusual. We have seen some fake bidders manipulating the process to artificially raise the price. We have allowed raising the price Tk 10,000 at once. But some people raised the price more than ten times at a time. We are afraid it will discourage the genuine bidders," a Nibco official told the media on Tuesday.

Meanwhile according to pickaboo.com CEO Morin Talukder they are going to filter the bids to have the real bidders.

"We don't have any token money or safety deposit option. It was an open bid. We have now put it on hold for some time so that we can filter the bids to find actually interested parties," Morin said.