To follow-up on what David (Cycleback) and Adam had to say, collusion doesn't always cause the final bid to be lower;e.g-I agreed to go in with another board member on a fairly expensive large lot of cards. I ran the bidding end of things and bid it up fairly high. When it got to the point where it was too high for me, I stepped away. The take-home message is that I would not have bid at all if not for the other forum member agreeing to go in with me on the lot, so my bidding stimulated activity and possibly caused the lot to sell for more than if we had not partnered up. Sometimes neither of the 'colluders' would bid unless they had an agreement, so in those instances the final price has to be either the same or higher.
This case (if the $20K estimate is correct) might have yielded opposite results, but only because the pool of prospective bidders was much smaller.
I don't know about outing the other guy - there are two sides to every story, and getting into a massive pissing match is never pleasant for anyone but the railbirds.
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