Am I the victim of a shill?

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Seller's ID is beanershobbies out of Erie, PA. The bidder's ID is sjgolf4340. Never dealt with either before.

This is the auction:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOIBSAA:US:11&Item=160100426952

bidder came out of nowhere and spent the entire afternoon bidding me up in $5.00 increments from $30.00 to 76.00. Hasn't bid on cards before, only golf stuff. I hope I'm wrong.

On the upside, the price isn't outrageous considering that I get Satchel Paige, Feller, Boudreau, Lemon, and Doby in the lot, just struck me funny is all.

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Posted By: Jim Dale

Did you win the auction? Which is your username? Or are you the seller? The only victim of a "shill" would be a buyer. A seller could be the victim of someone playing games with eBay and running up auctions to get you to pay fees and then give you a negative feedback - that has happened to me.

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

winning bidder- Lowells-of-boston

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Nothing seemed out of ordinary with the seller so far as I could tell. It's the bid increments by the other bidder that kind of threw me.

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Posted By: Steve

Lowells

IMO it appears that he was just trying to win the auction and tried to do it with small bids. By doing that he ran you up.

Could it be a shill? possibly. IMO though, it was a new ebayer (like yourself) that did basically the opposite of what you did.

You put in a max bid, he kept bidding the minimum needed to overcome your bid. In the end he stopped at 75.00 not knowing how high you bid.

Then again i could be wrong too.


Steve

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Steve-
Thanks for your post, I think you're right. He's a new bidder and bid as such, although sometimes that can be similar to the pattern that shill bidders use. It caught me off guard and I was suspicious at first.

BTW I'm actually an Ebay veteran, but I have several accounts including this new one.

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Posted By: Jim Dale

What made things look even more funny was that you have no feed back listed. Why do people need more then one eBay ID? I have never understood that - never had more then one myself - ever. I'm not trying to be critical of it - I just don't understand the benefit of it?

Any way the key features of a shill would be if the other bidder retracted after finding your high point. That would light things up pretty clearly; otherwise as noted here its someone hoping to get ahead of you with the next bid - I've done this but not to that extreme.

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Posted By: Mike

I don't want to out an auction, but I'm watching an item that has a masked bidder (thanks again ebay) with 60 bid retractions the past 30 days. The suspected shill has bidded multiple times over the past few days, and the auction still has several days left. What concerns me is if a shill keeps bidding up an item only to retract their final high bid when it looks like there won't be anymore bids. Is this a common practice with shills? I can't think of any legitimate reason why a bidder would retract so many bids in 1 month.

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Jim-

I have two ID's because my eventual plan is to buy with one and sell with the other. A few others on the board do that as well. My old one has 100% feedback and I've had it for a few years. I want to use the good foundation I've built with that ID for sales.

As I said before I pretty much jumped the gun with this and I now think it's probably not a shill. case closed

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Posted By: Dylan

Adam, I dont see where anyone treated you badly, or put you under a microscope in this thread. Seems like everyone gave their opinion on whether they thought someone was shill bidding or not, and there was one question inquiring into why someone would need more then one ebay handle. Nothing there if you ask me.

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Thanks for the post. Kinda flew off the handle there over nothing. Just having a bad day I guess.

I appreciate the opinions.