Shill Bidding defined

[Leon]

My comment was meant to address the legality of shill bidding on ehay. I have never done it there or anywhere, but my guess is, ebay has to follow the law just like everyone else. If it is against the law then it is against the law on ebay or otherwise. If it isn't against the law, then it won't be against the law on ebay, and no internet peanut gallery comments (not aimed at you, or anyone in particular, Steve) will make it true. It will be against their policy not illegal (I guess it could be "ebay-illegal"). Ebay is working on getting bid retractors addressed and I hope they ramp up efforts to stop shilling but it seems almost impossible.
I think shilling sucks big time. O

Originally Posted by steve B

As far as I know, Ebay policy tends to follow what's law in California, or in some other more restrictive location if it becomes a requirement for doing business there.
For instance there's a whole bunch of stuff from WWII that is fine here, but not fine without disclaimers in Germany. To avoid problems, they very readily pull that stuff. A friend had a marlin arms matchbook showing a GI trampling a Nazi flag, propaganda, but not pro Nazi. They pulled it and explained someone had complained about the swastika. Meanwhile he'd gotten a very nice off-ebay offer for it from the guy who had been the high bidder.

[ajquigs]

I had the same reaction.
I thought I recalled a different standard being stated by PWCC in the past and I found this 2015 post from Brent.

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthr...errerid=617072

Policing Bidders:
On the topic of bid behavior it’s particularly frustrating to be accused of auction manipulation when I actually feel we are working to improve bidder behavior more than anyone else. It's impossible to watch every auction, but we police the bid as much as we can and have blocked more bidder ids for bad behavior than anyone else I know. As our company has matured we have had various policies come and go, some of which have proven more intelligent than others. For example one program I regret most was from 2009/2010 when we allowed consignors to place a single ‘reserve bid’ on a consigned lot if they received approval from us. This sort of thing was more-or-less accepted back in 2009 and we didn't think anything of it at the time (hidden reserves are still part of the hobby with many auction houses). In hindsight this wasn’t a smart program to have engaged in because it opened the door to abuse. We made a mistake offering this as a service and ended it in 2010. We certainly didn’t want to hurt the hobby and we have not offered this option for over 5 years. This is just an example of where we admit to being imperfect and we sincerely hope folks don’t hold this against us. Every business goes through a maturation and we continue to mature alongside the hobby at large.

[Republicaninmass]

Since every time he has made a posted it was in defense of so ething he already did, I believe this was in reaction to possibky uncovering pwcc_auctions was winning auctions from Pre_war_card_collector

[Dpeck100]

I don't know who all reads CU but I brought to the boards attention that the shill snipe bid was very common and identified it happening in PWCC auctions.

Because you can win your own item perhaps now it makes more sense.

Snipe bidding is loved but the shill's have joined that team and are using other methods than just the typical bump bidding.

They use the shill snipe to create the true hidden reserve and to stick it to the nuclear snipe bids.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Leon

My comment was meant to address the legality of shill bidding on ehay. I have never done it there or anywhere, but my guess is, ebay has to follow the law just like everyone else. If it is against the law then it is against the law on ebay or otherwise. If it isn't against the law, then it won't be against the law on ebay, and no internet peanut gallery comments (not aimed at you, or anyone in particular, Steve) will make it true. It will be against their policy not illegal (I guess it could be "ebay-illegal"). Ebay is working on getting bid retractors addressed and I hope they ramp up efforts to stop shilling but it seems almost impossible.
I think shilling sucks big time. O

I totally missed clarity on my post.

Ebay being a California company tends to have their policies aligned with the laws in California. Which makes things complicated for everyone, because what's illegal shilling in one state may not be in another. It is true that Ebay makes no laws, just follows them.
My friend also did a lot of reloading equipment, but would get stuff he wasn't allowed to put on ebay, since while it was ok here in Mass, it was banned in California.

I can sort of see if someone is a dealer/auctioneer in a state that allows what we'd all consider shill bidding they might not know that it isn't allowed somewhere else.