pwcc
 

It is good to see Brent is posting here. Since he is, I certainly hope he will address concerns previously expressed here and elsewhere (1) that his scans are not realistic depictions of the cards being offered but appear overly bright and (2) that high dollar items in his auctions sometimes appear to have bidders with astounding numbers of retractions to their name and/or very high percentages of bidding activity with him, suggesting (at least to me) the possibllity that they are bidding up their own items and retracting once they find out what the high bidder's max was.

Seconded

I'll put this to the top so it'll make it easier for Brent to click on it when he's looking at the thread he started.

Jeff, it's me and you and a dog named Boo lol.

I wear welder's goggles when I bid on his auctions.:cool:

Did I miss anything?

You missed a Brown Old Mill back that ended up selling for $51. :eek:

Oh wait, it wasn't you who missed it. ;)

I have used Brent and his services on several auctions. He has always been straight forward and honest. To accuse him of misdeeds without any hard evidence is sorry. Just my 2 cents.....

I don't think its unfair in the least to ask for an explanation why there are substantially more people who bid and then retract their bids than in practically any other auction with the possible exception of one. What is unfair is the prolonged silence that is met when that question is asked. IMO, the lack of a response is very problematic.

Kenny there is no need for anyone to be accountable in the age of stuff trumps all. If someone, anyone, has a card on someone's want list in the right holder, it will sell -- possibly for a world record -- whether it's trimmed, otherwise altered, shilled up, whatever. And people will keep coming back for more of the same.

The cards are always very bright for sure, and I was under the impression that Brent was on the lookout for shill/retracted bids and policed his auctions to some extent. Thank you Peter for the insight. I will await a response.

D@v1d $h1p$ey

Brent does a fantastic job - by far the best avenue to buy/sell sports cards.

Jason

If that's true, then why keep complaining about it?

There is always that last ray of hope that things might change, I suppose.

The owner of the auction house posted on here asking for ways to improve his auctions. I think answering these concerns would help improve them. They might get me to bid in his auctions if a card that I wanted appeared there - that wouldn't happen today.

I think he just requested feedback on the auction format. He got a little more than he bargained for - which isn't a bad thing, I suppose.

All we can do is try, I guess. This image editing thing is going to be a tough one to combat. Namely because image quality can vary by scanner and it is almost impossible to prove wrongdoing.

I would put Just Collect, Sterling, Mile High, and LOTG in the category of auction houses which DON'T image edit. But it is tough if you see a card you want, not to bid anyways.

Yes, cleaning up any fraud in his auctions might be the best way to improve them.

+1

Some of the 'turn a blind eye' comments are astounding.

it seems that fraud/wrongdoing only gets admitted...and under duress...when the gov't comes knocking!

What is the solution?

Seriously, this question is always asked in these "witch-hunt" threads, but it is never answered. The silence is deafening.

Brent, at one point your auction pictures looked like someone was tripping on acid and painted a baseball card with an array of highlighters. It's okay to adjust the contrast a little, but you went over board in the past. I think your pictures now look much more realistic and you found an appropriate middle-ground; thank you for listening to our advice.

Also, several auctions appear shilled. I personally don't think there is a solution to this epidemic, but DON'T WORRY, ullmandds, Runscott, Peter_Spaeth and the-illini all have viable solutions for you!

Lets hear it.

Brent (hi Brent) is great to work with as an advertiser. He seems like a nice guy too.
I have bid and won nice cards in his auctions and will continue. That being said, I hope he will consider banning ebayers from his auctions with inordinate amounts of bid retractions. More than about 2 per year is probably unacceptable. So there is at least part of a solution, Pete and Jason.....

I think it's possible to monitor auctions over a certain threshold to check for consignors bidding up their own items, or suspicious patterns of bidding by bidders with huge numbers of retractions in their recent history. I would start there.

wouldn't this hurt some of these ebay consignment places? one of the advantages of being a consignor there is how easy it is to shill up your items.

I don't think it is ever bad to get rid of fraud. Maybe in the short run the numbers will go down a little bit, but in the long run Karma is a MOFO.....just my opinion....

You think it's possible?

You have been complaining about Brent since yesterday on this thread and you're uncertain if there is even a solution to te issue you are protesting?

But okay, your solution is we check the bidding activity on items above a certain threshold for consignors bidding on their own items. That's a start.

Brent currently has 11,318 completed listings on his ebay account spanning 3 auctions. What are we making the threshold? How about $250. I certainly would be sour if I was bid up on a $250 card. There are 2,219 listings above $250. Since each listing started at $.99 they all had anywhere from 20 to 30 bids (sometimes more) and usually around 10 unique bidders. I timed myself looking at each bidder on a single item to determin how many bid retractions they have had and what there bidding pattern was - it took me 2 minutes and 37 seconds. In the end, I do not believe it was shilled. It would take me over 96 hours to go through each auction above our threshold and in the end we would only have a handful of "suspicions". Of course, it would take me much longer to some how cross reference each bidding ID with the consignors information (which isn't possible) and after all that we were able to block MAYBE a dozen accounts.

Now, we're forgetting that the consignor may snipe his auction (so there's nothing we can do about that) and the consignor may create a new account not under his name (which would also make things difficult).

Please, someone walk us through a solution that would be able to solve this whole ordeal.

JHS5120 - I like your solution. Keep head buried in sand, claim it can't be fixed, and move on. With that attitude, I guess I can safely assume that you don't bother to ever lock your home or car doors. After all, burglaries happen and you can't stop them, right? So why bother to lock or even close your doors?

Leon had a great solution ... don't allow anyone with 2 or more bid retractions to bid on the auctions. You didn't address that.

How about, don't let anyone with an ebay account created when the card was consigned, or after, bid on the card without contacting the consignment house? That would prevent the consignor from creating a new account simply to bid on his card.

And I'm sure there are other ways to combat the problem other than throwing one's hands in the air and claiming it can't be done.

I did address it. It would take approximately 96 hours to look at the amount of bid retractions for every bidder on every auction (with a threshold above $250). Which is only covering 20% of PWCC's auction. I think we can both agree that isn't a solution.

It would take even longer to look up every account creation date and then cross-reference that to when the consignment was received and that would end up being a purely speculative process. Brent might as well quit auctioning items and just work full time trying to nab shillers.

I agree.

Some of the greatest minds in the hobby frequent this board, I am genuinly interested in hearing a viable solution to the problem.

If we're going to sit at our computers and bash a small business owner, how about we put in a little bit of thought and figure out a solution.

Jason, why can't Brent tell us his thoughts on these issues instead of you? Doesn't he have more invested in concerns about the fraud that might be occurring in his auctions than you do?

And why are we responsible for cleaning up his auctions? I wasn't aware of that responsibility. I thought our responsibility started and ended with the rules of his auction.

If it takes 96 man-hours to check for retracting bidders, then hire help to do just that. As the problem is attacked it should start to get under control, with bid retractors blocked. As for new accounts being prohibited as potential shills, you can simply deny bidders with less than 5 or 10 feedback from bidding unless they get approval–no need to check account creation dates.

And no one said you have to run 12,000 auctions at a time. Turning away consignors (or postponing their orders) may seem like anathema, but the excuse of “I’m making too much money to care how I make it” is a non-starter with me. SHOW SOME INITIATIVE.

I'm not the person to ask that question to.

Yes, I would love to hear his take on the whole issue.

If a person comes onto a public forum and "outs" the owner of an auction house for fraudulent activity that is beyond his control, he certainly has the responsibility to offer a solution.

The rules of Brents auction explicitly forbids the act of shill bidding. If it is OUR responsibility to adhere to these rules then how can we blame Brent for the people who do not listen?

Per PWCC:

The sportscard hobby hinges on the honesty and integrity of the seller. Too often we hear of fraud and other manipulation that serves to undermine the integrity of our hobby. Bidders deserve better, where bidding is 100% legitimate and uninfluenced by manipulations such as fraudulent (shill) bidding by the auction house, consignors, friends of consignors, friends of the auction house, or anyone else who participates insincerely with the sole intention of manipulating the sale price. We do NOT permit shill bidding of any kind and actively police our auctions to prevent such acts from occurring. If we learn that a bidder is questionable, we take action in the form of canceling the bid and blocking a bidder from participating in future auctions.

To preserve the integrity of the bidding process, we believe that eBay is the best forum to host auctions due to the privacy of the eBay platform. Unlike proprietary auction software, eBay’s platform is equally transparent to both the buyer and the seller. We don’t know the value of a bidder’s max bid, nor do our consignors, or anyone else. We've spent the last 15 years on eBay (since 1998) working to garner the trust of collectors and the hobby at large. Rest assured that you can trust our service and can participate in our auctions with the confidence that integrity is our #1 priority.

As a technical issue any seller who does large volume is in a very bad spot.

As JHS said, it's a lot of hours if you do even a basic search for retractions manually. 96 hours is more than two full weeks of labor just to check something basic. Or at $7 an hour $672. Maybe there's enough in the sellers cut to support that, maybe not. Plus those three full time people will need computers to work with.

And it's fairly easy to beat. Just have multiple accounts, one gets banned, but finds the max bids (But not snipes) Another snipes and that's the shill.

Oh yeah, if it takes 96 hours to check bid history, how long will it take to then cancel bids and ban sellers? Figure at least as long. So double your labor cost.

And that still won't really fix it.
say a bidder with 5 retractions bids on 10 items inside the last few seconds and wins them all.
Sure, you can cancel the sale for not following the auction rules and make second chance offers. But that looks fishy as well doesn't it? (Of course it does, we've all discussed it before)


So the solution needs to be a computerized solution.
I don't think Ebay has a feature to proactively block based on retractions.
So whoever wants to do it will have to come up with their own software.
I believe Ebay can be accessed automatically for the info.
That just leaves writing that program, and making adjustments whenever Ebay decides to make a change behind the scenes.

Have you seen what a really good programmer costs?

Ok, now do the math and figure it out from a purely business perspective. Purely business. Will those things add enough to the bottom line to even cover costs? Maybe it will. Maybe more people would bid or would bid more if they knew almost for sure they wouldn't be shilled.
But you need a lot of sales to cover that. If the consignment fee is 20% you need an extra 3300 a week ( 174720 a year plus since I haven't figured fica etc into labor costs)at the absolute minimum. If you're talking about a computer programmer it's more like 300000 to cover a cheap one.(figuring 60K/year, not unusual for a fresh college grad in programming Good experienced ones cost more, much more but may be faster)

Now wait for it......
A month in you get a C+D letter from Ebay because they really don't want you doing that with their customer data. Or maybe they just want a huge license fee. patent trolls start at around 50K, I'm guessing Ebay would want more.

And there goes a few thousand in development costs. Unless it's actually a patent suit, then it's development costs plus a stack of cash.
(I met someone who wrote their own bidding software that accessed customer data and bids to automate sniping within the last second. They got just such a letter from ebay)


Anyone up for it? Someone want to bankroll the project as a bit of commercial software? I know a few people who could get it done.

Anyone want to try to present it on shark tank?

Steve Birmingham

Doug Allen had a Code of Conduct too. See indictment.

Respectfully, I have to question... "Where have you been?" What you are posting here simply is making Peter and Jeff's point (among others) for them.

This HAS been brought forward in the past and it goes UNANSWERED. It has been brought up again explicitly because Brent has posted to the forum. Peter simply was asking for Brent's response to this.

Either they are doing what they say they are doing (see bold and highlighted) or they are not.

FYI it took me about three minutes to find five (or maybe it was more) suspicious bidders who should be investigated. The stats people throw up in an effort to make this seem more overwhelming than putting a man on the moon don't impress me much.

You are correct. They do not.

This whole situation could be easily solved by ebay allowing/exposing the bid retraction number on their "excluded sellers" option list. Similar to they way they allow you to set minimum feedback requirements for bidders who you can prohibit from bidding.

What type of "investigation" do you wish Brent would conduct on these 5 suspicious bidders?

I agree, I think Brent is in a bad spot because of volume. (Same with other large ebay consignors like Probstein.) However, I do think there are some solutions.

The most obvious would be if ebay would actually get off their butt and help out here. First, ebay can make the bidding id's public. Then everyone can see the actual bidding id's. Next, beside the bidding id in the bidding history, ebay can place the location (City/State) of the bidder. Therefore, if a bidder create fake id's, you can see it b/c of the location of the bidder. However, how about those bidders who fake their location? You can require that the location be mapped to a confirmed shipping address from paypal. In addition, ebay can require that all bidders have paypal accounts. (or if ebay does not, PWCC can in their auctions require that all bidders have valid paypal accounts.) In their paypal accounts, ebay/paypal can require that all accounts have confirmed bank accounts linked to them. This way, it won't be as easy for bidders to create fake accounts, and ebay/paypal can make sure that the account name on the bank account matches the account name on the ebay account along w/ the location. This way there would be more transparency for potential bidders to see what's going on in the bidding history for an auction, and ebay would be able to catch shill bidding much easier. Even if someone is having a friend bid for them, it would be much more difficult if they're near the same location. Obviously, there would still be loopholes if the friend or dealer friend is in a different state.

Another thing that ebay can add is as part of the Buyer Requirements, add a requirement for bidding retractions where if a buyer has a certain number of retractions in the last year, prevent them from bidding in the auction. Then sellers can use this auction to help prevent shilling.

Everything I mentioned is pretty much for ebay. Obviously with so many auctions, it's tough for PWCC to police every one of them. However, perhaps they could participate in some of the threads more openly, and post the actual bidding history of auctions when asked. Basically if certain auctions were questioned, they could investigate those auctions openly as needed, which would help ensure the public that no funny business were going on.

Ebay's auction system was never designed for the type of consignments that are taking place. It was originally designed so that people could sell their own items. It worked well for a while, although there was plenty of fakes and scams. Yet now we have the rampant shill bidding as consigners bid up their own items.

You have sellers such as PWCC, Probstein, Just Collect, etc, and then you have the auction houses. Either way, you are not immune to shill bidding - from the consigners on the ebay auction, or with the auction house itself. Even if the auction house is not shill bidding, a consigner could have a friend bid on the card (although there often is no issue with retractions).

Inevitably, everyone is exposed to fraud and dishonesty. PWCC/Prob/JC need to do a better job of monitoring their auctions, but an even greater problem is the image editing. This is the new steroids for baseball cards vis-a-vis the auction houses. Shill bidding has become too risky in the wake of the Mastro arrests, so image editing is the new way to inflate prices.

The part of the solution I was talking about takes about 3 seconds. Check someone's bid history, if more than 2 retractions a year, ban them. I don't give a rat's ass where they did the retractions. I am all inclusive of any ebay auction. That is a workable partial solution.

If we found a cure for breast cancer would we take it now or wait until all cancer is curable?

Jeez, you posted this yourself.

If we learn that a bidder is questionable, we take action in the form of canceling the bid and blocking a bidder from participating in future auctions.

Time spent by potential victims of fraud in PWCC auctions discussing solutions to fraud = much

Time spent by owner of PWCC auctions discussing solutions to fraud = 0

simple
 

No Auction house will stop Shill bidding!

IT MAKES THEM MONEY to have shill bids

IT COSTS THEM MONEY to Police it....

sorry folks...it will never stop....

EBAY LOVES SHILL BIDDING....they have meetings every month to talk about how they can further HIDE shill bidding for their customers...

its like beating a dead horse....IT WILL NEVER END...part of buying something over the computer....

This argument really reminds me of steroids in baseball...

The FANS love the home runs and offense!
The OWNERS love increased gate revenue and higher TV contracts!
The PLAYERS love their names in the record books and the higher salaries from increased revenue!

The "only" people who get hurt are the players who don't want to take steroids but find that they are not able to get a job in MLB b/c of all of the steroid users producing better numbers.

It's the same thing in this situation. Consignors, even honest ones, will flock to those auction houses that seem to bring the highest prices. So the honest auctioneers will tend to get less consignments. Those consignors who don't shill will get lower prices on their consignments, which may be flipped by consignors who do shill, inflating the VCP average. Then honest buyers see these average selling prices and think that these are the prices they can sell their cards in the future, but it's all a mirage created by this shilling.

not saying I agree with shilling..its very bad ..BUT and this is a big BUT:

THERE IS NO INCENTIVE TO STOP....and a big incentive to continue to shill...

IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP IT, that is the problem..

how many theads has Probstein been subject of for letting shill bidders consign with him...its never ending and he has no incentive to stop it!

even when they are caught red handed (as been shown here plenty of times) THEY DONT STOP.....

actually I think they get more brazen AFTER the get caught and have no repercussions....

The above is significantly less than the time spent by owner on this forum soliciting feedback to help improve his bottom line.

If a few of them are fined & jailed then that would be a BIG incentive to stop. Until that time...let the shilling roll. Seriously, unless arrests and/or fines are presented this will likely not end.

First of all, be careful of our full name policy. Secondly, just curious who has been caught shill bidding and didn't stop or got more brazen? The incentive to stop is prison.

You cannot police every auction of every bidder and weed out who is a serial retractor or not.

It really doesn't matter anymore. It's not just shillers who are doing this, it's bidders who have decided this is a great bidding strategy for them to suss out the high bid.

You can however, very easily weed out the bidders who are placing retractions in YOUR auctions. Every time somebody retracts a bid in one of your auctions, you receive an e-mail from Ebay telling you this. It's not rocket science and it's not time consuming. A couple circumstances like this happening in YOUR auctions, you do a little investigating, you confront the bidder with a message, and then you cut the bidder off at the knees or find out he has a tremendously valid reason for doing what he did.

Just to clarify, Brent is soliciting feedback because I had reached out to him expressing my concerns with the new mid-day closing time. Sure it helps his bottom line but he seemed genuinely interested in addressing my concerns as a buyer/consignor.

Strictly IMO and just a thought, one easy way to eliminate the shilling (or the potential of shilling)in these type of traditional auctions, save the man hours of attempting to police it, and still attempt to maximize the profit of the consignor would be to use a reverse auction format via BINs on ebay.

I was only referring to people bidding in his auctions.....but not where they had done it previously. If they retracted 50 bids, and then bid in his auction and canceled it, ban them. There aren't millions of people doing this. After the first 20-30 I am going to guess you have most of the major bid retractors bidding in your auctions banned and taken care of. Again, it's one small step but one in the right direction, imo. I am not talking about policing all of ebay, only one's own auctions...and then only with major bid retractors. This wouldn't be that difficult.

Where can I turn on this eBay automatic notice of someone retracting a bid in my auction? I haven't found any way to turn on or opt in for such a notification.

I say this in all sincerity, because I was just about to suggest that the easiest way for eBay to police this kind of thing would be to let the seller know every time it happens. Get 30 notices in a day of the same guy bidding and retracting in your auction, and you're bound to notice them clogging up your inbox, no matter how many listings you have. That also saves you the trouble of having to suss out who the serial retractors are. All you have to do is look for the recurring eBay ID's in your inbox, and act accordingly to ban those from bidding on your auctions.

I've never found a way to set up such notifications though. I don't sell at near the level of pwcc, but I know for a fact that I have had retractions on my auctions in the past where I wasn't notified (I only noticed because an item that was at the top of the list in number of bids dropped down when I refreshed the screen, without any other bids having come in. I confirmed it by checking the bid history, but wouldn't have thought to do so otherwise).

How?

I decided to try it myself, looked at about 25 auctions bid history. Only checked patterns that looked odd.

That took roughly 13 minutes.

I did find three bidders I thought were a bit suspect, and two maybes.

But over a couple thousand auctions the hours spent would be close to what Jason had. And call it statistics, but the costs I figured would be the costs no matter what you call them. Checking requires labor, those workers need to be paid.

I do agree that some effort would weed out the most obvious problem bidders.

I'm not so sure that would reduce the overall problem since those bidders might be replaced with new problem bidders.

And I have doubts that such light scrutiny would satisfy you.
If a big consigner came on once a month and said he'd spent a half hour and banned 5 people would you be ok with that? Or would you demand that he look into every bidder.
If he looked into every bidder on items over 250 would that be ok, or should it be every bidder on every item?

And what's the threshold for "suspect" a couple bid retractions? A certain pattern? Someone intent on shilling will work around almost any detection method. (See also computer anti-virus programming. They're written nearly as fast as the AV can be adjusted to block them)

I agree shilling is bad, and that some steps should be taken. Persoanlly I'd be happy with any genuine effort by any of the large consignment companies.

But it does have to be tempered with a bit of realism. Not all suspect patterns are shills. Not all shills can or will be caught. It doesn't mean not trying.

Ebay allowing people with too many retractions to be blocked would be a very big help. And for Ebay it wouldn't be that hard or expensive. (Not counting the lost fees from shilled items.) They already have the programmers on the payroll.

So far no takers on bankrolling a shiller detection program..........Not that I'm expecting any.

Steve B

I think one of the things that many agree with is that numerous bid retractions could a sign of shilling. If nothing else, they are definitely a sign of a "suspect buyer".

So.... it's time to put the myth to bed on how "time intensive" or "expensive" it is to monitor and act on possible shill bidders on ebay. Submitted for your approval...

Since my last post (less than 2 hours ago), I downloaded a FREE web crawler and configured it to show me a list of all the PWCC ebay auctions that completed in the last 7 days, view ALL the bidders on those auctions, and extract the number of bid retractions EACH bidder had for the past 6 months. This is under the Bid Extract column at the bottom. Each line in the bottom section is a list of the bid retractions in the last 6 months and the URL to a SPECIFIC buyer. There could be duplicates, but this could be filtered out.

This was a a POC (proof of concept) approach from myself, and while having some background working with computers, I have NO experience with web crawlers. That is why the output is somewhat "dirty" but could be beefed up and made pretty with probably a little more effort. Obviously from my lousy jpg I'm not one to be doing scan enhancements. :)

However the point is this: It is NOT difficult NOR expensive for someone selling on ebay to monitor and trace back bid retractions.

Note: I am NOT saying that PWCC knows about this or is involved with this or doesn't care. It was simply an exercise to point out how simple and cheap this is to do, if one has the desire to do so.

Does this one qualify??



http://tinyurl.com/k3d63f8

same dude..........underbidder

http://tinyurl.com/lkvfruk

Crickets.

Pwcc
 

RE: bid retractions...

We do get a few bid retractions each week we hold an e bay auction, usually due to buyer's remorse in which they will click one of four reasons that e bay allows, VERY RARELY is it from the same bidder constantly. We will not tolerate this if it happens over and over again(3 x MAX).

The most common is bid wrong amount, and if the amount bid is NOT rebid correctly, we assume the bidder is reneging. If cancelled within 24 hours of the lot closing, we will block the bidder. Notification is sent by e bay for every retraction and can be seen when you click bids on my e bay. If the bidder has not asked us to cancel his bid for whatever reason, and if he feels it is his right to withdraw a bid after days of retraction, forget it, we will not allow this bidder to bid again. It is very simple to resolve, e bay does send notification in each retraction situation. Hopefully PWCC will do the same so that it does not cause him or the legit bidders heartache, and these reneging bidders(in most cases) should be banned from bidding in the future.

Once in a while, a bidder that retracts does so for personal reasons beyond their control(such as illness) however an e mail explanation is proper and a courtesy and should be done for everybody's sake. It is not fair to bidders or sellers either way...e bay is already WAY too slanted in buyer protection in certain instances.

There isn't any excuse for allowing what appears to be fraudulent bidding. If you want to avoid being questioned about possible shilling, etc., then you do periodic spot-checks and ban the offenders. Unless it's part of your business plan, in which case you just stick with it, ignoring those who can't do jack (us) until you get caught by someone who actually can put you in the clink. Then you find religion, do your time and come back with an improved plan.

That 1 is enough proof for me. Also someone in that auction with 0 feedback bidding 12k with plenty of time left in the auction to retract the bid and someone with 14 feedback and 4 bid retractions in the last 6 months bidding 11k plus.

D@v1d $h1p$ey

That's another thing one sees spending a few minutes clicking through the high dollar auctions -- same bidders with mega retractions or high percentage with seller, bidding on disparate items that seemingly one person would not collect. Here, the Mantle rookie and a Cabrera autograph. That is imprecise and circumstantial, of course, but noticed it many times.

The only way to prevent hard to detect crimes is to have the worst possible punishment when caught. I suggest execution by a razor toothed sloth, starting from the feet up.

In real life, there is a poisonous boa, but it doesn't squirt the poison from it's teeth as with vipers. Rather, it holds its victim still, spits the poison on the victim then chews it in.

Or as was Woody Allen's punishment in prison in Take the Money and Run: 7 days locked in a sweat box with an insurance salesman.

People are shilling auctions; not just Probstein or PWCC. I know it, you know, even Rick and Brent know it. Here is my take:

-People continue to go to Probstein and PWCC because they are getting top dollar.

-Shilling drives up the prices so the seller maximizes his profits as well as Probstein and PWCC.

-Probstein and PWCC are doing nothing illegal (as long as they are not the ones shilling).

-So if Rick and Brent were to REALLY get tough and police it, what would it do to their business? Would they start to lose customers because they were not getting top dollar anymore?

So what is their vested interest in doing anything about it?

Funny thing is I know a guy who won his own auction that he consigned to Rick, paid for it, Rick mailed the card back to him then he sent back to Rick to re-list.

Mark

And yet you have people like Larry (painthistorian) who care about their integrity and their buyers, who take measures such as the ones he outlined above to stop these practices.

The only way this will come to an end at least on eBay it would be by eBay somehow coming up with a system that if you retract bids more then once or twice in a month it locks you out for 30 days.

Given eBay's history of "solving" problems with cover-ups and changes that really don't help, I can pretty much guarantee that before they do anything like this or any other elaborate programming solutions that anyone has suggested, they will simply stop showing the retracted bid count. Then nobody will know which listings to gripe about (at least, not with any certainty). No griping = problem solved from eBay's standpoint. ;)

Still trying to figure out how to get notification of someone retracting a bid on one of my auctions. I get them when someone withdraws a Best Offer, but not for retracted bids.

I always assumed it's a default setting because I've always received an e-mail when somebody retracts a bid in one of my auctions. I didn't realize others were not getting retraction notices.

I'm guessing it may be more an e-mail client setting then an Ebay setting. Maybe going to the spam box for some reason.

I think we are saying the same thing Leon.

-1 ... only because I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. :(

I expect the auction houses to at least do the bare minimum to protect its customers.

A previous post shows a Mantle card that went for $12,100. The bid history on that card is sickening.

D@v1d $h1p$ey

ding ding..we have a winner! so easy to enact!

but why would ebay do that? the more shill bids, the more money for them!

In shill bidding situations like this, PWCC is the account/ebay user who's ass is on the line ultimately so we can all do our best as legitimate buyers/bidders to force the issue and attack this problem.

Its been mentioned multiple times that these consignment sellers have thousands of listings going on simultaneously. If we take time to report those auction listings we find that are being shilled (using the link included in every listing to "report a listing") Ebay should begin to put the heat on those particular sellers. In Ebay's policies they mention they will begin to notify the seller of shilling in their listings and if enough reports/multiple reports are made regarding a particular seller that Ebay could restrict and/or suspend the sellers account.

Maybe when Ebay begins to receive multiple shilling reports over and over again about consignment sellers like PWCC this will force PWCC themselves to become more vigilant in eliminating shilling on their listings because if they don't, it's their ass and their business on the line.

When an Ebay user agrees to these terms by placing a bid, guess what... Brent automatically enters into the same agreement to uphold his end of those same auction rules which clearly and explicitly state:
We do NOT permit shill bidding of any kind and actively police our auctions to prevent such acts from occurring.

If Brent has too many listing to (I'm quoting from his own rules) "actively police" all of those listings then he is in violation of his own auction rules! And if having too many items listed at one time prevents him from following through with his own rules then that is his fault, he has failed his responsibility and he is in violation of his own auction rules and this is completely unacceptable.

Ok, I wasn't aware that could be done that way.

I'll consider myself proven wrong about a major portion of the costs.

Someone would still have to check out those bidders, but with the largest part of the job done it's a much quicker task.

Even as a quick proof of concept this should be made available to sellers. If I was still selling and doing large volume I'd want it.


Steve B

Steve,

Just to clarify. My comment wasn't directed at you (or anyone in particular). :)

And you are correct about needing to follow up with specific items/bidders. My "sample" shows 8 retractions as the highest, but my sample only grabbed 150 bidders (and I didn't filter out which completed items, so it could have been grabbing $20 sales as well, meaning there are other things that can be tweaked). When you start grabbing more, you only need to start at the highest # and work down. I think there were those here that "found" bidders in the 50s for retractions. But even double digit retractions alone should start to give one pause. That is, if the seller actually wants to deal with this.

Thanks to everyone who has written here in a fair manner. These message boards provide a valuable check & balance to the hobby and we are not exempt from harsh (accurate or inaccurate) criticism.

From reading the comments and concerns on this thread it appears that there are two primary issues raised:

1) some folks feel scans sometimes appear inaccurate to how the card appears in person.

Scanning is something we take pride in doing right. Obviously we have no interest in misrepresenting a card as it would only hurt our buyer satisfaction. Frankly, this is the first time we have heard anybody suggest our scans were misleading. On that note, I can confirm that we've recently introduced some new scanners and that our settings have fluctuated somewhat over the last 90 days. However, the images we are now producing are exactly as we'd like them to appear so I ask that folks consider the images in current auctions and forward any examples that you feel are inaccurate. Please also remember that much of how a scan appears is as affected by the settings on the monitor you're using and if the scans appear overly bright (for example) you may want to consider lowering the brightness on your monitor.

Just to confirm, our scans are never enhanced artificially. We do have to specify certain parameters when the image is captured but all items sold receive the same settings and never is a single item isolated and adjusted in any way. Even if you don't like our scans, at least you be assured that they are 100% consistent from card to card.

Lastly, we have dedicated more time and effort to the scanning process than perhaps any other auction house. Yes, our images SHOULD appear brighter and clearer than your average scanner which often produce a grayish, sometimes foggy filter over the image. Our goal is have the card appear as it does in-person under quality lighting... nothing more, and nothing less.

2) questions surrounding bid retractions, etc

This is a valid concern and one we take very seriously. In fact, we are the only seller I'm aware of that actually prosecutes bid retractors. Anyone who retracts a bid in our auction is flagged by eBay trust and safety and their account is labeled with the improper action. Buyers will receive notices from eBay specifying their improper action and after a few retractions their account will be suspended. Furthermore, anyone who retracts a bid in a manner which we feel is highly unethical (i.e. perceived as possibly manipulating an auction) with have their account immediately blocked from future bidding with PWCC.

eBay has a weak policy on bid retractors and we are working with them to strengthen their position and issue more account restrictions when retractions occur.

Our policy on bid manipulation is firm, and has teeth. Any ID felt to be participating in an improper manner is blocked from bidding and reported to eBay. Any consignor who we feel may be manipulating their own auctions is also blocked from doing business with us and will have their IDs block and reported; this latter scenario is rare but has occurred. We have zero patience for this sort of activity and will pursue improper behavior with every resource we have available.

-------------------------------------

A couple comments that we ask all auction participants to consider as they help us police the eBay marketplace:
1) just because a bidder places 50% or more of their bids with PWCC does not suggest they are manipulating an auction. We have over 15,000 unique past buyers and many of these past customers appreciate the service we provide and choose to bid with us for the majority of their eBay bids. We have some clients who bid exclusively with us and will show bid percentages of 80% or higher. The critical detail to research is whether or not these bidders have received feedback from us for past purchases. A flag for us is any bidder with a high % of bids but little to no feedback; statistically it is unlikely that a bidder would place many bids, perhaps largely with only our account, and not win any items. Bidders with this sort of track record are usually blocked.

2) just because a bidder places multiple bids (even 10+ bids) on a single item is not automatically label that bidder as a shill participant. In researching countless situations like this, it has become abundantly clear that many eBay bidders choose to bid in ways that some would consider eccentric... they feel it's part of the fun of bidding on eBay. Until eBay changes its minimum bid increment, this sort of behavior may continue. What is important to look for are bidders who place multiple bids until becoming the high bidder and then retract their bid. Bidders who bid in this fashion are quickly blocked by us and are reported to eBay.

3) Please keep eBay in perspective with the other non-eBay auction venues. The beauty of eBay is that it's impartial and transparent. This transparency affords a wealth of information pertaining to bidder activity and information will naturally lead to conspiracy theories. If any impropriety is believed to have occurred, please contact us so we can take action. Please avoid jumping to emotional conclusions and let the data determine what’s right or wrong. Nobody cares more about the auction integrity than us. I assure you your time will not be wasted and we will research your claim. Help us make it better!

Thanks again to all who help make this hobby honest. Collector confidence is our #1 priority; without trust, we don't have much to offer our clients.

Brent Huigens
PWCC Auctions, LLC
brent@pwccauctions.com
510-725-7853

Thank you for your response.

Never heard the concern before about scans?
 

"Frankly, this is the first time we have heard anybody suggest our scans were misleading."

Uh.... there is this ...... from CU

PWCCAuctions
New Member

Posts: 2
Joined: May 2012
Wednesday April 10, 2013 12:40 PM



As a general rule we try to stay out of the message boards because we feel they should be dominated by buyers/collections who are allowed to communicate freely, without intervention from sellers, dealers, auction houses, etc.

In rare cases we do feel a need to respond, most often when claims are made that simply warrant a response. To not respond may somehow suggest we condone slanderous comments, which of course we do not.

In particular, we are writing in response to baseless claims that we somehow are manipulating our scans. Such accusations are ridiculous and I ask that folks please remain substantive in their accusations of any company (not just PWCC). We are not altering our scans, in fact we go to great length to ensure the images we provide are as close to life-like as humanly possible. Obviously, if we were altering images we'd have plenty of upset buyers... right? Aside from the obvious moral objection associated with this level of misrepresentation, the shear workload associated with having to manipulate scans would be stagging. So even if you don't trust us personally, perhaps you can trust the practical impossibility of such an accusation.

The other topic I'd like to comment on is more general and it regards the overarching negativity that seems to stir around honesty and the hobby. As a fellow collector, I absolutely identify with the frustrations we've all felt from the past with various signs of impropriety. No doubt, history has shown a good number instances related to bid manipulations and other forms of fraud in the hobby... I get it. That said, we at PWCC have worked tirelessly to distance ourselves from these issues and feel we offer the single cleanest, most transparent auction venue in the hobby. We don't own the eBay software so we don't know the bid amounts, bidder IDs are available to the world with bid statistics, and our auctions are actively monitored by eBay trust and safety for improper bid retractions and various other activities from non-reputable members, etc. We ask that folks reach out to us directly if any signs of impropriety are detected and while these concerns are almost always explained, we always respond and address every concern in earnest.

The hobby is very strong these days and record prices are being realized on a regular basis (across the entire hobby; not just in our auctions). I ask that folks please exercise reason before posting slanderous comments about any company. For PWCC in particular, I ask that you please reach out to us directly (and post to this message board if required) but please give us a chance to address concerns directly. Our contact information is below.

Thanks to everyone who's an active member on this board; this is a very important part of the hobby.

Brent Huigens
PWCC Auctions
brent@pwccauctions.com
510-725-7853

Lolololololololol

"Frankly, this is the first time we have heard anybody suggest our scans were misleading."

Ummmmm, er, ahhhh, I meant the 2ND time I heard about it.

LMAO..............this is classic.

Mark