High bids at cap auction for flood victims

Cologne (dpa / lnw) – At the online auction of an old baseball cap from flood helper Markus Wipperfürth, the bids leveled off at a six-figure level one day before the expiry. On Sunday afternoon, the last bid was 124 299 euros.

By Thursday afternoon, more than 133,000 euros had been offered on the Internet platform for the farmer’s worn-out cap from near Cologne. But then the page suddenly disappeared from the network. According to Ebay, the auction was automatically stopped and only available again on Friday evening.

Ebay had explained the interruption with “formal discrepancies in the seller’s account”, so that the system had “automatically ended” the process for security reasons. On Friday evening, the starting bid was around 25,000 euros.

Wipperfürth has been working as a helper in the Ahrweiler region in Rhineland-Palatinate, which was particularly hard hit by the flood, for weeks. He said he would like to use all of the money from the auction to benefit the flood victims there, he said on Thursday. He did not expect that the auction would lead to such a great response and such a high amount.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210808-99-770581 / 2