Posted By:
HankronOther than protecting sellers of fakes, private auctions are also used to hide shill bidding (Broadway Rick).
In my my opinion, and I bet the opinion of many others, if eBay could do one and only one thing to prevent fakes and scams on its website, it would be to ban private auctions .... And, before someone starts a debate on the theoreticals, I am not against eBay allowing private auctions for certain reasonable circumstances: sale of the Hope Diamond, a sale of particularly sensitive nature, etc. The problem when you get into this type of theoretical debate ('In theory a private auction could legitimately be use for...'), is that in reality I've never seen the Hope Diamond offered on eBay, but sure see a Hell of a lot of Roy Huff's stuff. So, for the time being, my concern lays with Roy Huff's stuff and not the potential sale of Hope Diamond.