eBay Masking all Bidders

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Posted By: Jim Dale

It appears that eBay is now hiding the identities of all bidders on all auctions. I'm torn actually since one person does like to follow me around and bid on the exact same odd ball things I collect - guess he won't be able to do that any more. But its discerning to think some sellers can now simply cast a desired minimum bid on their auctions - if they are willing to pay for that? (using a 2nd ID)

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Posted By: JK

So you will be shilling your auctions then Larry?

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

Larry Haven is not allowed to post on the Net54 baseball forums...sorry if that interrupts the flow of conversation of this thread, but he has broken Net54 rules.

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Posted By: leon

Sorry, your post doesn't make as much sense since I deleted the post before yours.....The less we talk about larryhaven (troll)the better. I will not say anything about deleting any of his posts in the future and neither will the other moderators.....pretty soon he will get tired......or run out of IP addresses ......best regards

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Posted By: JK

No problem Leon - I figured it was a matter of time before he got deleted.

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Posted By: Steve

This privacy thing sure puts the brakes on messing with the scammers. Well, I'm gonna have to complete these honey-do lists now.

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Posted By: Jim Dale

Glad leon posted...for a minute I thought JK thought I was some guy named Larry I never heard of...

This is still a torn issue for me; mostly because I think cheating on ebay is rampant.

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Posted By: Cy

I am confused as to why ebay is doing this. The rationale on ebay's web-site is that some buyers use their E-mail address as their handle and, therefore, are being approached by people with off-ebay sales. This may be true, BUT ...

1) People who use their E-mail address use it so that others CAN E-mail them at will.

2) Couldn't ebay just say that buyers and sellers CANNOT use an E-mail address for their handle?

Just some thoughts.

Cy

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Posted By: boxingcardman

If we can't see the names of the bidders, we can't determine if a seller is shilling. If we can't find the shillers we can't complain about them. If we can't complain about them, Ebay's complaint rate will fall. If the rate falls, Ebay can claim it is combating shilling. All it is really doing is making it impossible to detect and report shilling but reality doesn't matter; it's all about perceptions so regulators and defrauded people don't come knocking, the press doesn't get interested (as they did with BRSZ), and the company's stock price rises.

Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

Notice too that ebay has done away with the system where you could scroll over the ebay bidder on the bidder list to see how many auctions that bidder has bid on from the same seller. In effect they have completely taken away every tool one has to detect shilling.

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Posted By: Jim Dale

However many people ebay "had" replying to shill complaints...I'll bet about 75% of them just got laid off.

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Posted By: scott brockelman

I don't think anyone has been allowed to have their email address as a user ID for years. I know mine used to be that when I started in 1997 and I was told to change it within a few years. I don't think anyone has an email address for an ID, but they may have part of it and the spammers and phishers are using attachments like msn.com or aol.com and blanket mailing them??


Scott

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Posted By: Steve Murray

My ebay ID is jacklitsch
My email address is jacklitsch@comcast.net
At one time it was jacklitsch@aol.com and jacklitsch@earthlink.com

So the second chance scammers take my ebay ID and run it through the most common IP's and voila they find me.

That is what this is intended to stop.

Now if your ebay ID is SB1 then you have no problem

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Posted By: scott brockelman

at one time mine was scottbrockelman or scottbrockelman@msn.com I forget and they made me change it. Now it's that simple SB1.

Steve outed me forever.

Scott

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Posted By: scott brockelman

While looking thru some listings this morning on ebay it suddenly dawned on me. Why even have the user ID visible at this point? It offers nothing. Just post the current high bid and be done with it.

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

SB1 is right...


It reminds me of Mr. Maxwell's phone auctions of 15 years ago, or so... You'd call and bid, and he'd either say you were winning, or that you'd been outbid and what the next bid would be. While I completely trusted him, someone could just tell you that you'd been outbid even if you hadn't been...

So eBay should just go ahead and get rid of the bidder list altogether. All it is now is a facade of legitimacy. We should just list something, then in 7 days they could tell us if it sold, or not, and if so for how much to whom.

This ID change has proven to be not a small step backwards, but rather a marathon in reverse.

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Posted By: 1880nonsports

and wife Virginia from PA. Believe they are still selling on eBay - she is anyway.

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Posted By: brian

I didn't know they were on eBay. Didn't they sell all their baseball cards many years ago?

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Posted By: scott brockelman

but of course you had to sift through every minute variation in the world of print anomolies. Guys today would have had a field day bidding on all of the "variations" that Jim preceived.

Scott

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Posted By: Bob

Can't you still go to the site map, hit "contact member," type in their user id and see what they are bidding on (unless you use a sniper service to prevent this)? I don't know, haven't tried it but it seems like if you were someone who wanted to nose around, you could.

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Posted By: BcD

I just tried that with you and Henry and poof!

nadda!

BcD

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Posted By: 1880nonsports

I just looked at the active bidding history on some itmes I'm selling. "I" could see the "details" on each bidder besides their ID - details which included how many of my items and others a bidder had bid on, % bid on, number of independent sellers - etc.. When I tried to look at someone else's listings and get the same detail - not possible. Unless I'm mistaken that allows me to ferret out shilling on my own listings but not those of other sellers. Novel concept......

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Posted By: Jim Dale

So I had some bids in on some cards and noticed two of them had gotten bid up a little and the masked bidder both had 270 feed backs and so I clicked in the little masked thing and found something interesting:

30-Day Summary
Total bids: 6251
Items bid on: 1624
Bid activity (%) with this seller: 71%
Bid retractions: 0
Bid retractions (6 months): 6

In the last 30 days 6,251 BIDS? Wow...only 270 feedback....and 71% of the activity with the same seller;

Wonder if ebay would care; of course I can't prove anything it just looks bad.

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Posted By: Richard L.

Jim,
That is one of the most suspicious 30 day summaries I've ever seen. And that's an average of over 200 bids per day!