A note about apparent shill bidding

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

Considerable debate as to whether that phenomena is real or more "urban legend".

Unless you are doing that yourself I have no idea how you would know this actually exists.

It's not an "urban legend". It's ridiculously widespread if anything. Bidders have been using this as a tactic almost from the moment Ebay made bidding habits private.

You don't have to be doing it to know this, you just have to be paying attention. Especially if you are a regular seller. I've banned several people from bidding when I've seen them step up the bids, only to retract at the top level.....then I later get an angry message from them asking why they are blocked when they try to put another bid in.

I explain the situation, and they always play dumb.

One time I even got soft and let a guy back in, only to see him repeat the same behavior again. I was pretty livid at the guy and myself for caving after that.

I get a message from a particular guy every couple months or so, wondering why he can't bid in any of my auctions. I just ignore it. I don't even remember if that's the reason he's on my blocked bidder list, but I assume it is because I can't find any record I had done business with him otherwise.

We have our own guy on Net54 who admitted using any tactic available to him to one up other bidders. Including racking up retractions on another type of collectible so his bid history looks as suspect as possible when bidding on baseball stuff.

I don't know if this type of bidding tactic actually works for anybody, but there's no doubt it's going on.

........and I'll say it for the millionth time, the easy fix for Ebay would be to limit retractions to a reasonable amount (say 2 a year, or some other arbitrary number), and a lot of this type of behavior.......along with a lot of actual shilling, would go away.

Ebay wants to hear none of this though. All they want are bids.........good, bad or fraudulent...they don't really care whether it hurts buyers, sellers, or both.