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Ebay is not an auction format. Recent attempt to bid for purchase was manipulated by seller.
Attempt to bid for purchase is manipulated by seller. (If seller doesn't like the price than they trigger a straw purchase.)
Should shut down the ex greatest garage sale warehouse.
Do not include sellers self congratulatory transaction in feedback. This creates a false positive image for sellers. Let's call this a whitey bulgar method.
2 comments
woodland_gnome
·2 years agoWhat you are suspecting is called SHILLING:
It is illegal.
It is against the rules.
It is impossible to do so with the selling ID, and eBay also blocks bids from other accounts that it has tagged as being associated with the seller account (including some accounts that have been wrongly tagged as such, at least according to those who have posted here after having been so blocked).
eBay also investigates reports of shill bidding (there is a Report item link on each listing, and "Seller is using other accounts to inflate item price" is in the menu it leads to) to some extent and has other software in place to try to find shill bidders and does take action against them, though this is shrouded in secrecy so we have no idea how successful it is.
But it still happens, more often than it should and less often than it is suspected by some (most posters coming here suspicious of a particular auction turn out to be misunderstanding how bidding works, how bid history is displayed, how other legitimate people might bid, or especially how many transactions fall through with no shilling involved). Trying to decide how to bid based on clues that may or may not be accurate is an exercise in futility: if you set your level of suspicion required to act (not bid) high, you'll get false negatives and you open yourself up to being shilled by that seller; if low, you'll get a lot of false positives, and miss out on some good deals, in the middle and you'll get a mixture of false positives and false negatives so it's still unreliable.
The best way to protect yourself against shilling is to wait until the last minute to place your true maximum bid, which you have calculated (ideally hours or days before; I recommend using a "snipe service" to place the bid--there are reliable and secure free ones) without regard to the prior bidding on the item. If you don't let prior shill bids affect YOUR bid amount, and you don't give the shiller time to probe YOUR bid to base HIS bid on the amount of yours, the price you pay if you win will be based on a legitimate underbid or on the seller's true minimum within an increment or so.
gosimus
Mentor2 years agoIt's pretty bold to accuse someone of committing a felony, without evidence. Maybe bold isn't the right word. What you're referring to is called shill bidding. Have you ever attempted to do it? Don't; you'll get caught. It's not as easy to get away with it as you seem to believe. Why don't you report the seller, then check a couple of days later to see if s/he is still in business?