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.
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