Small Traditions LLC/SCANDAL UPDATE

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Incidentally an interesting point was made on another forum where we were discussing what ebay meant by shill bidding by "persons associated with PWCC." Some think it only means consignors were running up their own cards, not that employees or house accounts of PWCC were involved. But as someone asked, how would ebay know who his consignors were?

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

That still doesn't explain I don't think how EBAY would know the information so as to accuse PWCC of allowing consignors to bid on their own items.

They likely wouldn't know in all cases, or perhaps even most cases, who the consigners were without some level of cooperation with the consignment companies. However, they can be reasonably certain in many cases. Here's one example of how they could predict who might be shill bidding on their own items.

Let's say eBay user 'goneFishing64 (18)' had 7 PSA graded cards for sale as 'buy-it-now' listings with his PSA certification numbers entered in the listings but wasn't getting any bites. He decides he really needs the money but knows that if he auctions them off himself, he wouldn't do as well since he only has a feedback score of (18), so he ends the listings and sends the cards off for consignment. Two weeks later, those same certification numbers get entered by the consignment company and one week after that, his eBay ID places a bid on all 7 listings, or a different eBay ID that shares an IP address with 'goneFishing64' places bids on those 7 listings. eBay would have all of this data at their fingertips and it would be easy to write a query to flag all similar cases. It would also probably find a lot of people doing this (albeit a small percentage of the total pool of shill bidders). But that's at least one way that eBay could be reasonably certain that a consignor has placed shill bids on their consignments with a company like PWCC.