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Suspicious Bidding
10 minutes before an auction ended, the high bid was $109 and that bid appears to have been made that day. Looking to win the item, I placed a high bid just over $200. I won the auction, just barely.
My issue is that the bidding history shows the $200 bid was made two days earlier, but the user name associated that bid never appeared in the bidding history as high bidder. Curious how a $200 bid could be made two days before and never show up as the high bidder. All other bids made were by people with different user names.
Curious to see if Ebay allows for such type of "Ghost Bids" to be made to magically increase the auction price, or is this some sort of "reserve price" game used by a Seller? Although happy to have won, just want to know if I paid a fair price or an inflated price.
Has anyone come across this situation or have some input if the bidding was legit?
eburtonlab
Mentor4 months ago@lbsevp
What is the item number?
In a no-reserve auction, eBay only displays enough of the high bidder's maximum bid amount to beat the second highest bidder's bid by up to one bid increment. So the high bidder could have easily bid much higher than the current bid amount showing. But if someone else had bid that amount earlier, they would have become the high bidder or else pushed the high bid up to or above that amount.
eBay does not display usernames in the bid history, and instead anonymizes the usernames so they appear in a format like a*****b; refreshing the page may change how the anonymized usernames appear, making it difficult to keep track of which bid was which.