Here you go with your conspiracy theories again and my "undisclosed purpose". :rolleyes:

I assure you I am not the one who is out of his element here. I'm a data scientist. You're a lawyer. This is a data problem that requires data solutions.

No, it requires judgment and common sense more than anything, you're wrong again.

They've sold millions of cards Peter.

Oh, and in case you've somehow forgotten. They still don't have access to the data behind the listings!

And data! Perhaps you forgot about that part.

Most fraud cases do not require data scientists to prove, sorry.

Nor will this one, should it happen.

Let me help you out a bit here. There is more (way more) to the functioning of a company than database analyses and program algorithms. I have no doubt that you can speak authoritatively on those topics. But, you need to understand that even a marginally competent accountant can suss out anomalous transactions in their sleep. Anyone with advanced training in corporate auditing would be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. The fact that you cannot grok this isn't the proof that you think it is. It isn't proof at all.

Of course, individual cases of fraud can often be discovered without the need for a data scientist or someone with similar data skills.

But that's not what we're talking about here. You don't get to move the goalposts. We're talking about preventing fraud at the enterprise level. Eliminating, or at least significantly reducing, to whatever extent possible, the problem of shill bidding. Not just catching a few bad actors here and there. If all they did was implement your "solution", nothing would change. You guys would still latch on to the other 99% of the people doing this and still say PWCC isn't clamping down on shill bidding. And those same bad actors would just pop up a new eBay account and do it again anyhow. They need access to a database of these users and their activity. They need bid history data and IP addresses in addition to numerous other relevant fields of data. Any solution to this problem worth its salt is an enterprise-level solution that definitely requires the skills that a data scientist possesses. But it sounds like you've got it solved. Perhaps you could sell your "solution" to eBay? I bet they'd love to hear you pitch. :rolleyes:

It's funny that people keep posting that PM between Brent and Courtney where Courtney says, "I'm not doing anything 10m other people don't do." While the number probably isn't 10 million people in just this hobby, his point is still valid. This is a massive scale problem and there are millions of eBay users engaged in this sort of activity daily. You're not even going to make a dent by spot-checking listings one by one. This is just a remarkably inefficient and ignorant solution to much, much larger problem.

You're moving the goalposts now and or making a straw man point. I never claimed my method would catch or stop all shill bidding. I only claimed, and stand by it, that it was enough to spot serious repeated anomalies in PWCC auctions that to me were strongly suggestive of impropriety. And, had PWCC taken the time to do the same, would have alerted them, if indeed their claim is they were unaware.

As Dylan sang, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Am aware of and have seen this screen shot before, and regardless of the specific content, does anyone find it the least bit disconcerting that the owner of an AH/consignment company would be actively communicating with bidders like this during live auctions of items being sold by their company? Just off the top of my head, I know we have various members on here who also operate/own AH/consignment companies. Would be very interested to hear their takes on this and if they would (or have) ever have communicated with bidders during one of their ongoing auctions like this.

And in regards to people posting that an AH/consignment company doesn't have the time or ability to watch and monitor their auctions for suspicious and potential shill bidding activity, how then would the actual owner of the AH/consignment company ever have time to engage in communications such as this one? Clearly from the content of the messages it would seem that there had been some prior ongoing communications to what we see posted. So again, if this owner has the time to be aware of this one particular auction and the potential suspicious bidding activity in it, they would most certainly seem to have time to watch and pay attention to other auctions of theirs for suspicious shill bidding activities as well.

Again, I completely agree. Anyone with training in auditing (or even my 10 year old nephew with a few hours of training) could suss out anomalous eBay transactions.

I'm arguing that you don't understand the scope of this problem and the manpower and skills it would take to solve it at a scale that would yield the end results we all want. I'm saying the solutions you guys are proposing are insufficient. Even if PWCC spent tens of thousands of man-hours going through their listings one-by-one and added all suspicious bidders to their blocked bidders list they still wouldn't solve the problem. Most would just bid from a different account the following day. But even if that all did work, they still wouldn't be able to block the vast majority anyhow as they'd still be limited to blocking a mere 5,000 users as discussed previously (which is a small fraction of the number they'd need to block).

As you say, it isn't all that hard to find one suspicious transaction. What someone is not seeing here is what happens when you start to pull on that string. Maybe nothing. But, maybe the whole sweater comes unraveled.

What I think has gotten lost here is that the counter argument is an exercise in question begging. Despite the fact that the argument that "there are two many transactions to audit" is patently false, it presupposes that there is a will to prevent shill bidding.

In that vein, on a number of occasions I pointed out to Brent serial retractors that were bidding in his auctions. Despite his announced policy of zero tolerance above a certain number of retractions, he (or Betsy) more often than not made excuses for the individual but did not ban them.

I understand that is what your argument is. But, again, it is nonsensical. You don't need to inspect every transaction. Auditing shares a simple concept with quality control and a number of other business functions: sampling plans. You will end up finding suspicious transactions, and to reuse the simile, those transactions are a loose thread to be pulled.

Guess it's time for this...

416. Besmirchants
The oft-mentioned, high profile card peddlers that every single one of us knows deserve every last bit of crap that gets thrown at them.

See also: Ignoraphobia - the righteousness keeping good people from ever spending a dime with these filthy dealers.

See also: Snubmariner - a person whose eBay searches use the “Exclude” feature to simply cruise by all of those sellers’ offerings.

See also: Appease Artist - someone who has no problem purchasing cards from these guys.

Snowman is an army of one in these debates. I think people give him (and his contrarianism) too much oxygen.

I plead guilty to that. DNFTT as they say.

It doesn't help because people are focusing on the wrong thing. It's not that he told him he would be outbid (I could certainly say that about lots in my auction, especially fairly early on, without feeling like I was risking impropriety) it's the fact that Courtney WAS THE CONSIGNOR OF THE ITEM IN QUESTION. Or has age dulled my memory and he wasn't, in which case why does Brent care how he bids?

Brent cared because, as the text itself notes, people were bitching to him about the string bidder bidding only up to the point of the high bidder's max bid but not taking over the lead.

If Courtney was the consignor I don't remember that.

I thought he bought the card from Brent at a National, discovered it was cleaned and Brent offered to sell it for him to get him his money back. Again maybe memory doesn't serve me correctly, and I hate to have to wade through all that old crap again. That's worse than trying to spot shill bidders in one of my auctions...

I thought he sold it through Goldin and that John Perez bought it and was the consignor of the auction in question. Could be wrong but fairly sure.

Well, if he wasn't the consignor then it's not the best conversation to be having, but materially it's pretty much a nothing-burger to me.

Agree and every time it gets trotted out as Exhibit A it's just tossing a softball down the middle to the defenders.

This is certainly true. And yet for some reason, I can't seem to stop outputting the CO2.

I don't see how this entire sweater unraveling could possibly happen though simply from "pulling a few threads". Moreover, I would argue that pulling out a few threads not only fails to unravel the sweater but those threads will just be replaced by more threads the following day when 'bannedBidder123' comes back as 'bannedBidder1234'.

Let's just pretend for a moment that PWCC (or Probstein or whoever) hires an internal BODA-like team of researchers to hunt down these bad actors full-time. And let's just pretend for a moment that the labor is entirely free so that they don't have to raise their prices and can still compete in this market. Perhaps they can hire a crew of college interns whose lifelong dream is to save the hobby. Let's say they succeed in compiling a list of all the eBay usernames who certainly, or at least very likely, shill bid on their consignments (or the consignments of others and they were just trying to pump cards with no intention to pay if they win). So now they have this master list of 100,000+ eBay IDs. What next? They've already added as many of these people as they can to their blocked bidders list (5,000) and they already ban them internally from consigning with them again in the future. What next? Even if they succeed, those same people just consign with the next company and do it again. And even if they get reported enough to where eBay bans that account, 'iShillCards2' just pops up again as 'iShillCards3'. The juice here isn't even worth the squeeze when the squeeze is free. But, of course, in reality it's not free. It would be extremely expensive to hire a team to do this. And for what? The end result is the same unless eBay itself decides to take drastic measures to address this problem at the ground level. They need structural changes in place to combat this and they need to care about the problem first in order for it to go away. To place these expectations & responsibilities on the shoulders of the sellers is a prime example of missing the forest for the trees.

At this point, I think its is clearly established that you aren't able to conceptualize anything except through the prism of your experiences as a programmer. You can continue to construct all the hypotheticals and what-ifs you want to explain why you think such a thing is impossible. But, it is inescapably true that tens of thousands of companies do it everyday as part of the normal course of business. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is unremarkable as things go.

You fancy yourself as some kind of devil's advocate pointing out the logical fallacies in everyone else's arguments. Yet, you seem to accept the PWCC story line with complete incredulity. Forgive me if this cuts too deeply, but I would remind you of what Feynman said:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

And, with that, not only have we strayed from Small Traditions, we have strayed from even talking about cards. So, since every thread needs a card, but I am not a pre-war collector, here is an Obak I do have in my collection.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vzxMkrowR...0/2010O_AD.jpg

Ah yes, the old, "Snowman is too stupid to comprehend this" argument. The bottom line is that there is only one person in this thread who actually knows what they are talking about. There is only one person in this discussion who is not only capable of providing a solution to the problem of how to identify and eliminate fraud of this scale, but who also has direct experience solving such problems. I was hired to build precisely this sort of solution for a major insurance company here in CA several years back, and built out a fraud detection algorithm/predictive model that resulted in capturing and prosecuting widespread industry fraud. I've also been contacted numerous times by eBay's recruiters to join their team to do what sounded like similar work from the emails. However, I have no interest in working at eBay so I didn't respond. You guys can sit here and pretend like you know what you're talking about, but you don't. Sorting through the top 10 to 20 (or even hundreds) of listings randomly clicking around like a buffoon, writing user names down in your little notepad with no access to their user ID history or IP addresses and turning over your cute little list to the eBay police is not going to solve this problem. If this was PWCC's own platform, then yes, of course it would be their problem to solve. But it's not their platform. It's eBay's platform and eBay is the only entity with the resources necessary and available to solve it. All of these "solutions" you guys keep coming up with are tantamount to trying to cut down a redwood tree with a pocket knife.

LOL but I am the arrogant one. What a piece of work you are. And it's all a straw man, I never proposed a solution to all the fraud on ebay, so you are attacking something that never was offered for that purpose. Buffoon indeed. Maybe a little reading comprehension would be in order for you. And how long before your massive ego problem causes you to self-destruct here as it did on BO?

Yet with all your wisdom and humility, you still somehow cannot seem to grasp the simple fact that eBay is the only entity that houses the keys to the door you wish to unlock.

You honestly think that PWCC could and should just hire a team of BODA-like researchers to go on an eBay bidder hunting spree, clicking away at random links (sorry, 'sorted' links, perhaps just the top 10 or 20 ought to do) and suddenly all is well in shill bidding land. Perhaps Brent himself could get this all done over a coffee break or two?

I've pointed out numerous very specific problems to every solution you guys have put forward here. None of you have addressed a single one of them. I have pointed out the scale of how many auctions they're doing (over 10,000 listings per month, and millions in total). I have asked what you propose they should do even if they could find a way to compile this magic list of 100,000+ naughty eBay userIDs for free. Again, you provided no answers. I asked how much manpower you thought it would take to research and address this problem. Again, crickets. You're not here for an honest conversation or dialogue. You're just here to sling mud. At PWCC, at Probstein, at me. You have no interest in listening to someone with real-world experience in what it actually takes to solve a problem like this. Nope. You're the expert!

"Just sort by the top 10 to 20 listings and look at the bid histories. You don't need a data scientist for that."
- Peter S., September, 2021

You're completely missing my point -- you just keep mischaracterizing it and making it much bigger than it is in order to knock it down -- so I'll give up. I haven't said a word about Probstein, by the way, so stop falsely accusing me.

OK, so since you think I'm mischaracterizing it, please explain it as you see it then. I'll be civil. I'm honestly open to other solutions if you have one to propose. Here are some questions that I think we can probably agree would be important to ask when considering any solutions one might put forward.

1. What, specifically, is the shill bidding problem that you think PWCC should be responsible for preventing?
2. What do you think the scale of that problem is?
3. How do you think PWCC can solve this problem?
4. How much do you think your proposed solution would cost to implement?
5. How effective do you believe your solution would be with respect to the percentage of reduction in shilled listings?

I never said that.

I will say this though: you are ignorant. You are ignorant in the same way we are all ignorant: outside our areas of expertise there is a vast world we know very little about and have to rely on other experts to navigate successfully. I am sure, within your area of specialty, you are every bit as brilliant as you have told us you are.

I know several accountants just at my current employer that I could turn loose on a huge dataset and within a week they would be back with a long list of anomalous transactions and a fully fleshed out audit plan to keep themselves busy for months on end. The fact that you are incapable of understanding that this is possible is not evidence that it is impossible. Failure of imagination is not an argument.

FWIW, the only T206 I own, a trimmed Frank Delehanty.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b_oaHVBKg...elehanty_F.jpg

Oof. I don't even know where to begin with this one. So I guess I'll just leave it be. You guys just have no idea what you're talking about. Accountants? Keeping themselves busy for months on end? lol.

1983 called. They want their "solution" back.

I find it disturbing Brent knew Courney's bidding ID, among the "millions" of Ebay bidders. Also had his cell phone # to communicate outside Ebay. It would not take more than a dozen or so "courtneys" to skew hundreds of sales. Say 2 dozen, and there is a new marketplace...see what I did there

scandal
 

now leaning towards snowman

PWCC Thrived for YEARS on Marketing, Ignorance, Laziness, and FOMO.

Let's see how they do now off Ebay in a overbought marketplace. Will be interesting to see. I think once their own platform auction starts they will do blowout record numbers....they kinda have to don't they?

That alone doesn't bother me, someone wins an auction of yours once and you know who he is, and Courtney was a frequent bidder and probably frequent winner. Probably a consignor too. Why wouldn't Brent know a major customer's ID?

But look at Brent's own posts from 2016, he knew who the guys were -- and it was 12-20 as best I can tell -- who were as he put it pushing the market.

So were many others of the shillers, I mean buyers group!

Right, I am only saying knowing his ID was not in and of itself suspicious.

First, you're defending Brent telling someone to shill bid on their items, now you're defending him knowing who his customers are and having their contact info? Sure seems like you have an "undisclosed purpose" participating in this discussion.

Nobody really wants to know how eBay runs it's business. The issue the board has with certain sellers is that THEY have no control over their own auctions re: shill bidding. Or at least that is the claim we're supposed to believe.

But it becomes obvious that if one seller is selling their cards for more than any other seller gets on the same platform using the same search terminology, it is because something is different about how that seller is running their auctions, not because that seller has the right audience. All the sales take place in front of the same audience.

As I am sure you are smart enough to know, I am merely being fair and objective and when people rely on evidence I don't consider incriminating, I will say so. Defending him is the last thing on earth I would do.

Incidentally a purported class action suit was just filed against PWCC in Oregon federal court alleging shill bidding. The Complaint is pretty bare bones.

Well, I'll take a try at it.

1. What, specifically, is the shill bidding problem that you think PWCC should be responsible for preventing?

That they do as little as possible to prevent it. It is a complex problem, as there are at least a few ways to shill. Some more stoppable than others.
Bidding up to a max then retracting- Either to ensure a shill bid won't win, or to gain an advantage. They claim they were blocking people with more than a certain number of retractions with Ebays help. (Point one against the idea that they have no access to the data, which in this instance is publicly available anyway)

Bidding in increments for the same reason. This is a bit harder, since the mobile app encourages it, just keep hitting the bid button until you're winning. But someone who bids that was but doesn't ever end up with the high bid is at least a bit suspect.

The one off bid from a bidder who isn't easily connected to the seller of consignor. Like having a friend put a bid on something as a sort of reserve. (Did it once, because I actually wanted the item and did win, pay and get it. ) I'm not sure something like that could be detected at all, and it's probably not easy if it is.

The first two can be figured out from information that's available to the seller.

I don't buy some of the tells others have mentioned, like "bought widely different cards" - I have bought T206s and modern junk wax on the same day, along with stamps and bicycle parts... so no, that's not a reliable indicator.


2. What do you think the scale of that problem is?

Lets go with the old fashioned "90% of the problems are due to 1% of the people" It may be right or wrong, but it's a place to start.

3. How do you think PWCC can solve this problem?

Having at least rudimentary software that looked at the readily available information and at least flagged it for a closer look. From their own announcements Ebay was letting them do that, and helping probably by making a slightly better dataset available.

Limiting it by setting a floor value for the item bids looked at would also make it quicker.

4. How much do you think your proposed solution would cost to implement?

I suspect it would be either much more or much less than my best guess. A few years ago we were discussing something here that I didn't think would scale, and one of the software guys provided the info in less than a couple hours. I guess it did scale easily after all....
On the other hand, I've asked my wife about setting up a database for me for a card project that's way beyond what I can do myself. The response has been anywhere from "Ummm.... maybe?" to "you'll have to learn that stuff yourself. It would take too much time"

5. How effective do you believe your solution would be with respect to the percentage of reduction in shilled listings?

In the short term, probably somewhat effective. Mid term and long term, less effective since as you point out the shills can just start up another account. If it's automated, maybe more effective than I'd believe.

Now if Ebay was serious about limiting that problem across all their auctions, they could probably prevent the replacement accounts pretty easily. I'm locked out of one website that won't allow multiple accounts since I use it maybe once every few years and can't recall my username or password and starting a new account ends with "you already have an account attached to that email, log in here"

Yes, I was just joking. But my point was that I'm doing the same exact thing. I'm being objective as well when I evaluate the evidence for and against PWCC's accusations. Yet you still assert that I might be some sort of company shill or acting on their behalf for some reason. I am a completely neutral party. I have no interests in PWCC other than being an objective observer of the hobby and an occasional buyer of cards that people happened to consign with them.

OK I will accept that representation.

I agree with you here. It is certainly frustrating that the consignment companies have almost no control over who bids on their listings (other than adding someone to their blocked bidders list, which as has been pointed above caps out at 5,000 users and is insufficient for resolving this issue).

I have to disagree with you here. Your statement assumes that everyone is searching eBay the same way - i.e., they're all typing in '1955 Topps Roberto Clemente' into the search bar and when one shows up that they like, they just bid on it, and that furthermore, they are every bit as willing to bid the same amount regardless of who the seller is. But in practice, this is not how it works. People use eBay in very different ways.

First, there's the issue of buyer's confidence. Having nice clear images that you can zoom in on will always outsell another listing of the same card with blurry pics. Buying from a seller with supernova feedback of 100,000+ ratings will always outsell 'jimbob007' with his (18) feedback score. Obviously there's no shortage of other reputable sellers on eBay, but if you compare a company who does all of those little things right against the overall market, they're going to outsell the competition for those reasons alone. But the biggest factor in how much an item sells for is hands down the number of eyes a seller can get on that auction. And this is where sellers like PWCC and Probstein far outweigh the competition. Just click on the user name of a given seller and you can see how many followers they have. I build predictive models for a living, and I can guarantee you if I were to build a model to predict card prices on eBay, that not only would this factor correlate to auction prices realized, it would probably be the #1 most relevant factor in the model outside of the card itself and the slab it's in. Here's a quick comparison of a few consigment companies:

PWCC (312295) - 43,944 followers still today, despite no longer selling on eBay
Probstein123 (893960) - 57,861 followers
quickconsignment_802 (37054) - 2,682 followers
gregmorriscards (312064) - 13,665 followers
4sharpcorners (312086) - 9,321 followers
sportscardauctionscom (91092) - 4,046 followers
bigboydsportscards (345236) - 12,816 followers
pcsportscards (45465) - 6,371 followers

Note that PWCC, 4sharpcorners, and gregmorriscards all have ~312,000 feedback (a fun coincidence) yet PWCC has more than 3x the number of followers as GM and 4x that of 4SC! And they certainly had even more than that before being banned from eBay. Marketing matters, and PWCC has learned this far better than their competition. Many other consignment companies have not. People in social media even do live PWCC auction watch parties. I just received a PWCC auction catalog in the mail this weekend. I get notifications from Probstein and PWCC on social media all the time, showing me cards that are up for auction that I never even would have thought to look for. I get email blasts from them as well. And PWCC organized thier listings intelligently. All 1950s baseball ending together around the same time, all 1990s basketball cards together, etc. People would log in and just sort PWCC listings by themselves and see what else was up for sale. This doesn't happen with other random sellers. And most sellers have next to zero followers, or just a few dozen. The only way their cards get seen is if someone specifically searches for that card and finds their listing.

Followers matter. Setting up your auctions in an organized manner matters as well. It's all about getting the most eyes on that listing. Say what you want about PWCC, but they were masters of this aspect of selling. Everyone else should be taking notes.

I'm Not a Twit
 

Tweet, tweet

I signed up for Twitter, before I realized I would never use it. I have followed no one. I doubt that anyone is following me, nor should they.

I don't think I have missed much.

I only do anti-social media.

I definitely understand the sentiment and avoid social media as well for the most part. I never use Twitter or Facebook. But I definitely think there is a disconnect on these forums that correspond to the age gap between the user base here and that of the broader market as a whole. Box "breakers" on Instagram and YouTube is all the rage these days with the younger generations. I've bought and sold some relatively expensive cards recently just from random people I met on Instagram (some random guy just wired me $20k last week for a modern basketball card). It's a different world out there. Most of the growth of this hobby in recent years is from people in their teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s. They experience the hobby in remarkably different ways than most who are in their 50s and above. The consignment companies who recognize this and find creative ways to market to them are the ones who are going to benefit the most. You'd be amazed how many people under the age of 25 that have 6 and even 7 figure collections and who are out there bidding on $20k+ cards.