Posted By:
warshawlawthat ebay is an "auctioneer" under California law and that undisclosed shill bidding is unlawful in CA. In my humble opinion, ebay is breaking the law every time it countenances a shill bid in an auction. That said, we must distinguish between types of shill bids. BRSZ set up another account and shilled his own auctions with it. That sort of redundancy should be readily caught by the programmers at ebay, so I find them culpable. Third party shilling, however, is impossible to police. If I make a deal with you to bid on your auctions to a certain level, there is just no way that ebay can be expected to figure it out. A lot of bids could be a shill--it could be a spirited fight between two dunderheads, too, which leaves ebay with "plausible deniability", to quote the spiritual forbearer of the present administration (sorry, couldn't resist; and yes, it is embarrassing that the architects of the Nixonian nightmare were mostly all lawyers--it should be similarly embarrassing to the non-lawyers that the present batch of crooks are all CEO types).