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Report a Shill Bidder?
How do I report someone who is shill bidding an auction I am trying to win? I know who they are from a Facebook Community and they are doing it to be vengeful as we do not get along and she knows I want the item listed. They bid me up to my maximum bid and then retract their bids once they have maxxed out my bid. They have done this twice now on the same auction.
6 comments
house*of*paws
Mentor2 years agoHi @drag0nfeathers
Are you saying that you ended up winning the auction twice ... and then refused to pay for it? Is the other bidder the seller of the auction?
[It's not clear what happened after the other bidder retracted their bids.]
drag0nfeathers
OP2 years agoNo the auction still has 4 days left. The seller is just a seller with an item I want to buy. The other bidder is in the same Facebook collectible community and due to a personal vendetta, she is bidding until she has reached my maximum bid, retracting the bid and then bidding again so she is just a few dollars below my highest bid... essentially jacking up the price to make me pay as much as possible.
house*of*paws
Mentor2 years agoThanks for the additional information @drag0nfeathers . I'm really sorry this is happening.
You can either open another account where the bidder doesn't know who it belongs to ... OR you can place your bid in the final seconds of the auction (i.e., 'snipe') so that nobody has the time to bid after you. [Sniping is the most efficient way to bid regardless of whether you have a problem with another bidder.]
I'm wondering how you are able to recognize this other bidder ... and they, you. eBay masks Usernames on eBay so that bidders remain anonymous.
drag0nfeathers
OP2 years agoWe're in a large Facebook community and we share our ebay wins on there for this particular genre of collectibles (Windstone Editions). Some of which are rare "one-of-a-kind" items so it isn't hard to figure out who they are by their feedback number as long as they have won and item and publicly advertised they won it on the group within the past 90 days. If they were the winner and showed photos of the item they won on the Facebook community it's easy to see who they are by cross referencing the feedback count on wo won past items on the seller feedback.
I had an "in search of" post for this particular piece that made it's way to ebay so she bid the piece up to my maximum bid and retracted once she overbid me. The bumped it to my max bid, so I am still winning currently, but my bid is maxxed. I upped my bid again and she did the same thing again until she outbid me and then retracted her bid again and repeated the same thing.
It's a piece that retails usually for about $400 on the low and $600-$650 on the high and it's now over $1000. I'm sure the seller is happy but it's not cool... I have a mind to retract my own bids, but I don't want to get myself into trouble so I'm just going to snipe at the end. It's still frustrating I can't seem to report her.
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 and are then relisted). 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.
drag0nfeathers
OP2 years agoYea... I plan to snip at the end but this tactic of pumping up the bid wasn't expected as I didn't think a fellow collector from my community would be this petty.