A few months ago, macadamia farmer Ken Brown spotted an ad for a second-hand tractor that seemed too good to be true.
The sellers were asking for $22,000, “which was cheap for a Massey Ferguson tractor”, he says.
Wary, he called them up and asked where the tractor was located.
“He said ‘Alice Springs, right in the centre of Australia, no one is going to travel that far to look at a tractor’ — that is what made me suspicious,” Mr Brown says.
If Mr Brown wanted to inspect the tractor first-hand, it would have been a long drive from his property near Lismore, NSW.
“They just picked Alice Springs because it’s an inaccessible place to get to,” he says.
But even if he happened to be in the area, Mr Brown was told inspections weren’t possible. Here’s a snippet from the email he received:
“Due to the nature of these sales, on-site inspection is not possible. Our asset providers (banks and leasing firms) are unable to welcome visitors for the obvious reason that they are not a shop for second-hand machinery nor do they want to become a public fair. Hence why we are in charge to facilitate the sale, transaction, and shipping of these units.”
Mr Brown was told the business was a “neutral facilitator between the seller and the buyer” and its stock was owned by banks and leasing companies trying to recoup losses from businesses and individuals.
They told him they had a so-called “buyer protection program” which would allow him to trial the equipment for 15 days — but he had…
