1964 topps tatoos shill bidding galore bassik and morris

[nolemmings]

If you are a big volume seller, I can believe that you might have some fanatically loyal customers. What do you do if you have a guy who regularly buys a lot of stuff from you and bids in a bunch of auction he does not win, and even retracts a lot of bids in those auctions ...and the guy is not a consignor. I guess you could block him since he might be making you look bad, but if he in fact has bought a bunch of stuff from you on an ongoing basis he could then drop a bunch of negatives on you in retaliation, and you lose his ongoing business

You are exactly right Al, and once again Larry has shown that he does not know much if anything about shilling. It would be nice to examine the so-called shiller's bid on that item Larry linked, but he has retracted everything, no doubt out of anger, since his bids topped out at $48 (I was watching) and the auction is at $312 with four days to go. Looks like now he'll even have more retractions.

So let's see. The top bidder in Larry's "smoking gun" auction has bid 1% with gregmorris cards, the under-bidder has bid 2% with him, and the third-place bidder has 0% bids with the seller--yes that's right, so few of his total bids that it registers as zero. These three are at present slugging it out with several days to go. Which one or more of these is in the "network" of shillers that seller uses to jack up his prices? Seriously. Oh but wait, some nutty bidder put in twenty something bids on the second day of the auction that topped out at $48.00, then stopped bidding altogether. That's your shiller? That's artificially jacking the price up how? When several others have bid 4, 5, 7X that amount and there are still days left on the auction?

Now if this guy bid $325 and then retracted it just so he could see where the top bid was and then re-bid just under that to max out the "honest" bidder, you might have something. But there's no evidence that this is what happened here or anywhere that I've been shown. In fact, that is the type of thing that could and likely would be called to the seller's attention by those at the top, at which point seller could block that bidder. But for mickey-mouse bidding that tops out at 15 or 20% of the final hammer price, it's doubtful that retractions in that range are noticed by or matter to most people, other than those who apparently feel it their duty to bitch and call people crooks without any substantial proof.

BTW, I just saw where the lowest bidder in Larry's "smoking gun" auction bid 9 times in about 11 seconds, topping out at $5.54. He has tons of retractions. Is he another shill? I mean running the price up to five and half bucks on an item that will sell for a few hundred dollars is dastardly and must be the work of some gregmorris henchman, right?

[vintagetoppsguy]

I do not believe any shill bidding was going on. That said, I still think Greg made the right decision to block the bidder. His bidding behavior (25 times in one auction) along with his 179 bid retractions just doesn't look good, good customer or not. It was the right thing to do.

It's kind of like if you owned a brick and mortar store and you had one customer (even a good customer) that always had really bad body odor and the other customers complained because of the smell. Do you get rid of the "problem" customer to appease the other customers even though the "problem" customer really hasn't done anything wrong? I would. It may be a silly example, but my point is sometimes you have to get rid of one customer to keep the rest of your customers happy.

Greg made the right decision in getting rid of a "problem" customer even if he really wasn't doing anything technically wrong, so as to not make the situation look bad to his other customers. Right move IMO.

[4reals]

I'm observing this thread with great interest because I too have purchased many items over the years from gregmorris on the bay. Obviously, I would hate to learn I got shilled but I've always felt I had a pretty good radar when something fishy was going on and never felt anything I bid on was funky. Greg has always been great to deal with, his cards are always as described and he ships quickly. I always attributed the interest he drew in his cards to the extra time he spends on email marketing.

As a bidder (and winner) of a couple of the cut 64 tattoos I can speak directly on that topic. I purchased the Perranoski for $7.50 and the Dodgers logo for $8.50. I would put both prices in that $5 range that Larry mentioned and would have gladly paid three times that for each considering the only other examples I've seen on ebay in the past 6-7 years were graded and in the $100-$300 range. There's no way I'm spending that on a subset issue, test or otherwise, just to say I own one. I'm very happy owning a cut copy for much less.

[D. Bergin]

Bidders are retracting bids as a regular strategy now, because Ebay allows them to. Has nothing to do with shilling for the most part.

All you can do is either block them or warn them when they start messing with YOUR auctions..............but if you started blocking everybody who has a ton of retractions with other sellers nowadays, you'd be left with very few bidders.

Ebay could solve this very easily by warning or suspending bidders with multiple retractions, but they don't seem to have any interest in doing this.