Do you mean the "marketplace"?

All the information I had seen had "buy it now" without mention of auctions

I know there are very smart and successful people on Net54. And lots of valid points were mentioned. I don't have much to contribute by way of speculation. But....

My father worked for Marlboro cigarettes (a parent company that has gone by many names including Philip Morris, Philip Morris USA, and Altria). What I learned from decisions that were made by a mega company is that they are ruthless and willing to do anything to maintain or grow their share in their market regardless of legality. The small group of decision makers at the top of mega companies are willing to lose astonishing sums of money in lawsuits because of the POSSIBILITY of making even more money.

Sometimes no amount of speculation will ever create a plausible reason for why a mega company chooses to do what they do.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

No, supposedly that's separate. I read that they are actually launching an auction platform in addition to the marketplace for their lower tier consignments. I'm just not sure what the format looks like or when exactly it will launch. I think I read October, or maybe November?

Heck, just go back to that story from a few months ago about the MA couple that were stalked, harrassed, and threatened by Ebay employees for posting things on their website that Ebay company execs didn't like. Company culture starts at the top, and works it way all the way down in an organization. If they would do that to a couple for simply postings unpopular things about them on a somewhat obscure website, what do you think Ebay would be capable of doing to one of their top sellers, generating around $300M in sales for the current year, if they suddenly wound up on Ebay's bad side?

funny that someone keeps waffling on their opinions

It's called being objective. You should give it a try sometime.

Ok, they didnt already publically announce they had plans for one before Ebay canned their sketchy ass. This we can agree on.

In the mid-90s, Marlboro sponsored the Billings MT fair a couple times. Some local yokel was selling gag gifts, and one of them was a silly cigarette product in Marlboro colors and design. My dad provided a cease and desist letter for encroachment on brand identification. Another time we were in Mexico, and we saw knockoff Marlboro stuff being peddled by sellers on the beach. My dad looked at me and said, "You don't know how much time is spent trying to eliminate stuff like this."

Sometimes it seems like mega companies don't care about money, they are willing to tie up litigation in the courts for years and years instead of paying a settlement. They don't save any money and their lawyers just keep ringing up the billable hours. And then at other times, they are going after mom & pops because every dollar counts.

Not surprised at all, and your Dad was right about the surprising and sometimes illogical things companies will do to others to stay on top and squelch any and all competition, even if it is only perceived and not truly real. Just look at a lot of the biggest names in business out there, that people often seem to adore, emulate, and want to be. They turn out many times to be the biggest a--holes on the planet, who behind closed doors (and on some rare occasions right out in the open) are truly horrible people who will stop at nothing to advance their interests and wealth to the detriment of all others. And that kind of thinking permeates down through companies and leads to things like the harassment and threats that MA couple got from Ebay employees.

I think that sometimes businesses view spending all that time, expense, and effort as not frivilously just throwing money away, but more like paying for insurance. They go over the top against someone or some entity to send a message to everyone else out there to not even think about ever doing or saying anything to go against them. Because if they do, they'll stop at nothing to fight back and try to destroy whomever they feel posed a threat against them.

A friend of mine at eBay told me that they are constantly trying to buy out their competition. Anytime a small online auction site makes a splash, eBay is there to buy them out, effectively playing whack-a-mole. They go to great lengths to ensure that not only are they the 'king of the hill', but that they have the only hill. Their business model is not particularly novel or complex. It is extremely vulnerable to competition. They fully realize this. Hence they attempt to buy out competitors before they can gain enough momentum. Just look through the list of acquisitions they've made over the years (and this list is not comprehensive. I know there are several more smaller acquisitions that aren't even listed here). They buy out other auction sites just so they can either shut them down or prevent them from growing into greater threats in the future. It is almost certainly the most important factor in keeping them in the position they're still in today. This is eBay's modus operandi. If they see you as competition, they will try to squash you or acquire you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...itions_by_eBay

Much like bribery though, isn't it. It only works when the other party accepts the bribe.

Not really, offering to buy someone out, and them accepting, is legal.

Sorry if the point wasn't clear. Let me try to make it simpler.

Bribery only works when the party that is offered the bribe accepts.
Buying another company only works when the company that is offered the buyout accepts.

Does that help?

No need, I got the gist of what you were implying and merely sought to remind others that your commentary was a bit misaligned. If you would actually look up the correct legal definition of the word "bribery" you'd see that it pertains to the offering, giving, receiving or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official, or other person, in charge of a public or legal duty.

The word/term also usually carries with it an illegal, or at least negative, connotation, which I assumed you were trying to imply in some way to Ebay's actions in regards to their acquisitions of other companies over the years. Otherwise, why use the specific word/term "bribery"? Regardless of what Ebay's motive's may have been for any of their business acquisitions, not a single one of them involved giving anything of value to an individual or person in an attempt to influence anyone's actions in regards to any public or legal duties. A business is not actually an individual or person, so by definition, you can't actually bribe a company/business. In the way you are attempting to apply the word/term "bribery", it is akin to someone posting on the B/S/T forum that they are looking for something in particular, and someone responds they have what that person is looking for, they negotiate and arrive at an agreed upon value/price, payment in whatever agreed upon form takes place, and the item's ownership and possession passes from the seller to the buyer. Which is basically the same steps and things that happen when one company buys another. Except, I don't ever remember in all my years anyone ever saying or referring to any seller from off the B/S/T, just like in my example, as having been bribed!!! I believe the average person would simply refer to that as "doing business".

Now, does that help you?

What is actually absurd is that you just posted the above. If ya want to play devil’s advocate or challenge groupthink, ya might want to start posting actual facts and accurate statements. When you don’t…and you don’t…it is not really contributing to an honest debate. The closer I read you the more I see you don’t always really know what you are talking about. Not sure why more do not call you out, honestly.

Anyway your conclusion that ‘the crowd always pointed to the fact that PWCC got higher prices for their cards than other eBay sellers’ was a basis for their determining shill bidding at PWCC is as spot on as you asserting eBay was materially impacted by their banning PWCC. The crowd does not have access to eBay bidder records but even without those there were countless times it was demonstrated shill bidding occurred.

Plus (as has already been pointed out) there is a publicly posted text message interchange in which Brent himself instructs his "minion" to place the shill bid. I don't have time to find it, but it's been well publicized. Perhaps Snowman conveniently forgot about that minor detail?

I am the last guy on earth to defend Brent, but I actually think that particular text message in context is not that damning.

Well maybe not, to an accomplished attorney. I'm sure his words could be twisted and interpreted in similar fashion to Bill Clinton trying to define the word "is". But to the average collector schmuck like me, it looked awfully bad. I personally did not see much of a grey area.

It's not that nuanced. Courtney was string bidding on a card but had stopped one level below taking the lead; the card was still well below market value as I recall. Brent said just take the lead for now it's a bad look when you string bid but stop short. Given where the bidding was, I didn't see it as trying to run the card up. That said, I would guess Courtney had lots of stuff that was much more damning.

Then you would have totally assumed incorrectly. I was not implying that, though you may have inferred it.

My point was made in reference to a SELLER selling the company. Ebay cannot acquire all these companies if the seller doesn't want to sell. It's not totally on ebay that they were able to buy up all these other companies (assuming no other nefarious leveraging going on). The ebay post seemed to be a 'piling on' post from a previous number of posts about 'big companies' and how they act. You are correct though in the difference being that an 'attempt to purchase' is not illegal where an attempt to bribe is.

Just trying, like others have stated, to be a bit 'objective'. :cool:

I think Taylor's point is simply that eBay's purported strategy takes two to tango. The analogy to bribery probably wasn't the best one because it's so loaded.

Correct. And better said. Thanks!

Feel free to respond to anything I say that you believe is not factual or an accurate statement. I have no interest in spreading non-truths and always welcome being corrected.

I don't know what your point is here. However, all three statements are true.

• "The crowd" does constantly point to the fact that PWCC & Probstein get higher prices for their cards as the basis for their claims about both shilling their own auctions.

• eBay was materially impacted by their banning PWCC

• The crowd does not have access to eBay bidder records but even without those there were countless times it was demonstrated shill bidding occurred.

That said, and for some reason I feel like a broken record with the constant need to point out the obvious here, but there is a massive difference between demonstrating that shill bidding occurred and demonstrating that the consignment company itself is the one doing the shill bidding. Similarly, and perhaps also worth repeating, there is a massive difference between saying "PWCC shilled their own auctions" and "individuals associated with PWCC shilled their auctions".

There's a third category -- the auction house knew consignors were bidding up their own items, allowed it, and perhaps even facilitated it by cancelling sales if they won.

To be clear, my point about eBay repeatedly acquiring smaller auction sites over the years wasn't to imply that they were doing something illegal or even shady by doing that. I have no reason to believe that any of these acquisitions weren't above board, and I think most were probably fairly savvy business decisions by eBay. I was mainly just pointing out the fact that it is evidence that eBay very much does take seriously their competition, even if that competitor is small relative to eBay. I am arguing that regardless of why eBay sent out that email, they definitely view/ed PWCC as a threat, and there is no shortage of very public examples of eBay attempting to minimize threats to their business, regardless of how small you think those threats might be (and PWCC is a much larger threat than many of the companies they've acquired or sought to acquire over the years). This in itself, of course, is not proof that they sent out that email for the sole intent of damaging PWCC's brand. However, I am simply pointing out that eBay has certainly established a precedent for this to be quite plausible.

Taylor,

As Peter already said, it takes two to tango, and I 100% agree. That's why I was a bit perplexed when you made the bribery comparison. That wording, with the negative and illegal bribery connotations, goes opposite to the point I thought you were trying to make. It puts Ebay right back in everyone's crosshairs as the bad guys, now for bribing people on top of everything else they already were disliked for. I'm actually with you, just concerned you made your point a little awkwardly. All good. :)

Ok, they cut their nose to spite their face.


"Since PWCC was going to open a marketplace, we risked libel and kicked them off our platform"

I aint buying it

"The crowd" does constantly point to the fact that PWCC & Probstein get higher prices for their cards as the basis for their claims about both shilling their own auctions. Which is it...constantly or always and whenever, as your initial post stated? Either way, so every time an accusation of shill bidding has been made by the crowd it always/constantly pointed to high prices as the reason? You need to read all the threads again. Neither constantly nor always are accurate on the frequency of the crowd using higher prices as the proof of shill bids.

eBay was materially impacted by their banning PWCC Define material because based on ebay's gross sales revenue of more than 10 billion, 7.5 million in fees paid by PWCC (which is significantly higher number than they paid) would not meet the definition of materiality.

That said, and for some reason I feel like a broken record with the constant need to point out the obvious here, but there is a massive difference between demonstrating that shill bidding occurred and demonstrating that the consignment company itself is the one doing the shill bidding. Similarly, and perhaps also worth repeating, there is a massive difference between saying "PWCC shilled their own auctions" and "individuals associated with PWCC shilled their auctions" I understand your distinguishing between the two but in my view if the company does not take steps to discourage shill bidding by consignors then they are almost as guilty as if the company engages in shill bidding itself. If PWCC knew several consignors were suspected of it, why keep taking their consignments? Further I am pretty confident the FBI and eBay can demonstrate shill bidding within the company. Not sure it would be that difficult to prove.

In the days before Brent blocked bid histories, and even more so when some of us knew who some of the bidders were, it was a lot more than prices realized that drove suspicion: massive string bidding, massive early bidding, people bidding on widely disparate cards that it seemed unlikely the same collector would collect, known market pushers even by Brent's admission bidding heavily, and perhaps above all tolerance of huge numbers of retractions. There were other anomalies too in the bidding sometimes that just looked bad. Could someone bound and determined to defend Brent offer a competing explanation in some cases? Sure. But overall, it was not a good look, at all.

Remember when Brent claimed on this board that he was one of the power sellers that was going to fix shill bidding on ebay's platform? Those were the days.

There is very little he won't say if he thinks it makes him look good.

Such groupthink here. Consider other explanations that exonerate PWCC for a change.

I just don't understand how you guys see this as PWCC's (or insert any consignment company here) responsibility though. They don't have access to the data. This is ebay's platform, ebay's data, and ebay's responsibility. Are you really expecting consignment companies to crawl through all of their listings and webscrape user ID data (which is against ebay's TOS) and bid history and follow who bids on what, and try to track people down? You think they should have their own internal BODA team? Do you really not realize how ridiculous these expectations are in practice? I'll repeat: they don't have access to the database where all of this information is stored! Only eBay does. How does this point never land with you guys?

PWCC forces you to enter your eBay user ID on your vault account, and they send you a stern warning email if that account ID bids on one of its own listings, and then they will ban you if you do it again. This is more than any other consignment company does, as far as I'm aware. They also block all non paying bidders. And even then, they are limited to just 5,000 user IDs. What more can they do?

Small Traditions?
 

Is anything in this thread about Small Traditions? Oh look, squirrel...

Maybe this will help...

https://luckeycards.com/courtney.png

Because it is a nonsensical point.

You know who also doesn't have access to eBay's databases? Everyone else. Including laymen who can, based on publicly available information, easily point to circumstances that strongly indicate illegitimate (and likely illegal) bidding behavior. And guess what? While those laymen only have access to anonymized bidder IDs, PWCC has access to the full bidder ID. And, if PWCC is as important to eBay as you like to tell us ad nauseum that they are, then they are one phone call away from knowing the bidders name and address that can be checked against the consigner's.

What percentage of PWCC's sales are associated with the vault?

Let's review three random facts:

1. There is strong (albeit potentially circumstantial evidence) that illegitimate bidding behavior driving up realized prices on PWCC auctions.
2. PWCC apparently doesn't have an audit function to review sales for said illegitimate behavior.
3. PWCC bans non-paying bidders.

These three random facts have a common thread between them. Can you determine what that is?

As I've pointed out many times when I see idiocy like PWCC can't possibly monitor its own business, it takes a few minutes at most to sort your auctions by highest bid price and look through a given number for unusual activity.

Incidentally Brent was keenly aware of who was bidding at least on his big ticket cards. When we were on speaking terms he always knew who varous masked IDs were, and would also know who various serial retractors were.

People are victims of their own ignorance and or laziness. All kinda of information is out their on PWCC. You can chose what you believe and what you don’t believe what you bid/but what you don’t it’s ok either way. Either way I think it’s cool to see how people think 🤔

People are victims of their own ignorance and or laziness. All kinda of information is out their on PWCC. You can chose what you believe and what you don’t believe what you bid/buy on along with what you don’t, it’s ok either way. Either way I think it’s cool to see how people think 🤔

With all due respect, I've read this screen shot dozens of times. It's a nothing burger as even Peter above acknowledged. This is not a communication where Brent is trying to get someone to shill their auction. This is him reprimanding Courtney for string bidding and not taking the high bid during the stages of an auction where the bids don't even matter anyhow.

I wish people would stop bringing up that text message lol because it really doesn't help the case against Brent.

Clearly, you guys don't understand the scale of what you are asking them to do or what it would take for them to "monitor their business" as you put it.

It's one thing to have an entire internet forum of free crowd-sourced resources with endless time on their hands and nothing better to do than clicking through random eBay listings in an effort to find someone who *might* be shill bidding their auctions. But it's something else entirely for a consignment company to be expected to hire a team to crawl through over 10,000 listings per week, mapping out eBay user IDs and cross-checking them to see which users might be shilling their consignments. This is an absolutely ridiculous expectation. Do you have any idea how much this would cost? Do you know how much it would cost just to set up and maintain a database alone to handle this, let alone the manpower? They've sold well in excess of a million eBay listings lol. Perhaps you don't realize that clicking on a 'bid history' link that shows eBay user IDs is not "access to the data". There's a huge difference between clicking links and seeing names and having the access to the data required to monitor something like this at scale and to be able to write code that enables you to intervene when necessary. When I say "they don't have access to the data", clearly this point has not landed with you guys. You clearly are not data people. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about here. You couldn't possibly have ever spent a day in your life in the tech industry if you actually expect them to do this. Meanwhile, this is an easy problem for eBay to solve. They already have the database set up with all the relevant data at their fingertips and the resources (data analysts & data scientists) to do it, not to mention the responsibility to do this. And let's not forget, they also already claim to do this on their website (even though they clearly do a shit job of it).

I have personally written fraud detection algorithms and have coded out large-scale projects just like this for my previous employer (a large insurance company). I know what it would take to accomplish what you guys are proposing. This is a huge undertaking. It's not just asking Billy and Sally to spot-check a few listings over their lunch break.

This is perhaps the single most ignorant post I've ever seen you make. You are miles out of your element here Peter. This is tantamount to me telling you how easy it should be to litigate one of your cases despite me never having spent even 5 minutes of my life in a law office.

I did it myself frequently, sort his auctions by price that is and look through the bidding on 10 or 20. It took no time at all. How arrogant of me.

This sort of sample was more than enough to identify certain types of recurring issues on expensive cards. You're missing the forest for the trees. You're also missing the human element, he knew who was doing what, and I base that on conversations as well as observation.

It's you who is out of your element, playing contrarian for some undisclosed purpose.

Just to lighten up things here, I would seek others' opinions about PWCC's vault situation. How many cards have fled since their bad news broke? Of those that fled how many have already been consigned to auction houses, such as REA and Goldin who have actively solicited them? Or how many cards are back in the arms of their loving owners who are waiting for the dust to settle? Or how many cards have stayed in the vault and will make an appearance in PWCC's first independent auction? Much pondering.

Actually, we do. It is called internal auditing and virtually all major corporations have a department dedicated to it.

But PWCC is sooooooooooooooo huge and vast and sprawling they couldn't possibly do it.

I guess I'll just keep repeating myself then.

They don't have access to the data behind the listings! Only eBay does. This is eBay's problem to solve. Not theirs.

I just double-checked for you. Looks like they still don't have access to the data behind the listings!.

Your proposal to sort through the top 10-20 listings does nothing to solve this problem. That's 10 grains of sand on an entire beach. And they already ban those users if they don't pay or if they bid from their known eBay accounts. You don't know what you're talking about here.

Actually it's not 20 grains of sand at all, because the bigger cards are where most of the problems were. But you seem incapable of understanding that. Also with all PWCC's employees they could have sorted through many more than 20 without much of a time commitment.