[swarmee]

Most sites let you either bid the next increment, or let you set a Max bid, but they don't expose the max bid until it's been outbid. Otherwise it would be like eBay where people would continue to string bid to expose what the max bid is, and it looks a lot like shilling.

I'm saying the person who bid before you put in the max bids, but since they weren't "open", all you knew was they took the previous increment. Once you bid the next increment, your bid wasn't high enough to be the leader, so their bid stretched to their max. Nobody else but the initial bidder is given that "benefit." And they only had it because they bid a max bid before you did.