Ebay Shill Bidders fined

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Posted By: DD

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=509&ncid=509&e=4&u=/ap/20041107/ap_on_bi_ge/ebay_phony_bidding

8 Ebay sellers were ordered to pay more than $90,000 in restitution for bidding up their own auctions.

I have found people doing this and reported them to eBay; one person was suspended for a week. Seems as if it would be easy for eBay to catch the people that have multiple accounts registered in their own name. I am sure there are a lot more out there.

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Posted By: warshawlaw

"The other two defendants were accused of making 170 phony bids on their sports memorabilia items. They agreed to pay $10,000 in penalties and restitution."

But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as we all well know. I always assume I am going to pay my max and I never use anything except a sniping service to bid on anything expensive, so as not to tempt casual shillers.

I hope there are more cases filed...

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Posted By: hankron

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm curious about eBay's potenial liability for shill bidding where it has knowledge it is happening. It may be a sound eBay argument that they shouldn't be held responsible for feedback comments, eBay chat board comments and for authenticating everything offered for auction. But does the same lack of legal responsibility hold with obvious shill bidding?

For example, with Broadway R., he bid on his own auctions with his own name, NBC had an article about it in which Broadway admitted that he shilled his own auctions. I beleive the result was that Broadway simply changed his auctions to private and eBay never suspended his account (eBay intitially said their hands were tied because they didn't have enough proof-- even though he bid on his own auctions with his own name!). If Broadway continued to shill in his auctions (Now golly gee wiz, why would Broadway have suddenly changed his auctions to private?), what liability would eBay assume?

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Posted By: Judge Dred

Tip of the iceberg.