Park West Auctioneers & Associates - Nightmares at Sea.   All Articles

The promises of fast, easy big bucks, followed by the cold reality of a negative pay slip where the auctioneers discover, after a month or two of work, that they have earned little or nothing and as often as not are now in debt to Park West!

In the past, Fine Art Registry® has mainly been inundated with the tragic stories of victims of Park West Gallery's high pressure sales tactics and their purchases, usually at cruise ship art auctions, of art sold to them as bargains and as investments which they later find out is worth only a fraction of what they paid for it and in some cases is simply fake and worth nothing at all. In fact, we have been asked for help from some 260 such victims to date.

More recently, however, we have been hearing from current and recent Park West Gallery auctioneers with accounts of being lured from their jobs by the promise of incredible pay only to discover that conditions aboard were far different from what they had been told and reports of minimal earnings or even finding themselves in debt to Park West as sales plummet everywhere.

It takes two or more months for the auctioneers to discover they have been deceived, by which time Park West has extracted a couple of months of slave labor out of them at no cost to themselves. These auctioneers and associates are expendable. When they decide to quit after seeing their first pay check, which as often as not is a statement of how much they now owe Park West, they are replaced by the next crop of willing suckers seeking a quick and easy buck.

The auctioneers and associates who have written and are writing to us, while they have been through a nerve wracking experience themselves for which they want to be compensated, are mostly concerned that others should not fall into the same trap: the lure of easy pickings and great riches which end up as virtual slave labor. They are understandably very angry at how they have been tricked into giving up their work to Park West under false pretenses, but they are also anxious to warn others who may fall into the same trap.

We will publish material sent to us by current or past cruise ship auctioneers and associates that we have reason to believe is accurate. We are unable to verify the details of the stories with Park West because they refuse to comment or cooperate. But the stories are borne out by many different sources and we have reason to believe they are accurate.

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