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What to do with sellers bidding on there own items?
I've called them out borh for bidding against their own items. How do we stop these scammers?
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Discussions in this board are limited to the original poster and Community Mentors
I've called them out borh for bidding against their own items. How do we stop these scammers?
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, or how other legitimate people might bid). 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.
serhd18
OP2 years agoThis guy knows the loop hole as well. Trust us deny because he tried to answer a question of his bidding Potential to keep it Is quiet no buyer can bid in cents only the seller can.
mr_lincoln
Mentor2 years agoHI @serhd18
What proof do you have that this has happened?
serhd18
OP2 years agoProof is only a seller can bid in .01 cents
woodland_gnome
·2 years agoThat is nonsense. The seller cannot bid at all under the selling account. You are misunderstanding how bid increments work:
There is not a single “bid increment rule.†There are 2 entirely different rules that use the same bid increment table (to make 2 entirely different calculations) that many (including, unfortunately, eBay in the Help Page with the increment table) try to conflate into a single rule and get confused:
1. A new bid must be at least 1 increment higher than the SHOWING "current bid" (NOT the HIDDEN maximum of the current leader) in order to be accepted.
2. The price (a/k/a the "current bid" while the auction is running, which is simply what the price would be if there is no further bid-related activity before the auction ends) will be AT MOST 1 bid increment higher than the underbidder's maximum (unless more is needed to meet the reserve in a reserve auction).
Note that rule 2 establishes a MAXIMUM, not a minimum. As long as the new bid meets the first rule as of the time it is placed, it can be any amount, including 1 cent higher or exactly tied with the hidden maximum of the current leader: if it is 1 cent higher or more, the new bidder takes the lead; if tied or lower the old leader retains the lead.
Example: Starting bid $.99. A bids $.99. B bids $5.00. B's bid shows at a "current bid" of $1.04 (1 bid increment of $.05 over the underbid of $.99) and the minimum for a new bid is $1.29 (1 bid increment of $.25 over the "current bid" of $1.04). C bids:
C's bid amount:..............New current bid:...............comments
$4.00..............................$4.25.................................B retains lead at 1 increment of $.25 over $4.00 underbid
$4.75..............................$5.00.................................B's full bid amount is used up, but nobody else can tell that since it would still show at $5.00 if it were higher
$4.76.............................$5.00.................................Since B's bid is only $5.00, eBay cannot tack on a full increment, so B leads at the full amount of that bid
$4.99..............................$5.00................................Ditto
$5.00..............................$5.00................................B retains the lead since exact ties go to the earlier bid
$5.01..............................$5.01................................C takes the lead by 1 cent since his/her bid is higher than B's and that's the full amount of his/her bid
$5.50..............................$5.50................................Now C's bid is used up but nobody else can tell since it would still show as $5.50 no matter how much higher s/he bid, e.g.:
$6.00..............................$5.50................................eBay only uses enough of C's $6.00 bid as needed to beat the underbid by up to 1 bid increment and hides the full amount. Note that the increment increases to $.50 at $5.00 and the increment for rule 2 is not the same increment as for rule 1 since the amounts the increments are being added to are in different brackets (rule 1 is based on the showing "current bid" before the new bid is placed; rule 2 is based on the maximum bid of the underbidder, whether that is the old leader or the new bidder).