Lets say you want some item. You bid on it, another "person" bids, price goes up and you stop. The other "person" wins the item. Fair enough. But the other person does not pay. What happens. One of the weak points of an auction is that the price can be increased by fake bidders. Someone bids knowing their bid will never need to be executed. And at worst case, they can just not pay. The result is that the auction company makes much higher profits. As well as the bidder. And everyone is happy as long as the buyer does not know. Can this happen on Ebay and does it? One mechanism to help make it easier for these scams is the "we will bid for you" practice, of setting a maximum price and letting Ebay up your bid. If you suspect the other "person" actually has a maximum bid you can probably guess that it is safe to bump the price. Can you determine if the "person" you are bidding against is a someone using an Ebay bidding agent? Yes. Because the bids go up over and over in the smallest possible increment. Suspecting this mechanism after using Ebay for a while, I recently tried to act like a "bidding bot" I post randomly timed smallest possible increment bids. You can tell if there was possible fraud by seeing the item relisted. Ebay will notify you that the item is "reslisted". It starts over. Here is the problem. By allowing sellers to start over, Ebay makes it painless for sellers to engage in possible fraud. What do you have to lose? The auction just restarts. You can do the thing over again. What policy would stop this? Instead of relisting, eliminate all fraudulent bids and award and offer the item to the next highest bidder AT THE LOWEST NON FRAUDULENT BID PRICE . So if at $20 (for example) bidder F1 started bidding the item up to $50, award the item to the bidder who placed the last highest bid - not at their highest offer but at their highest offer against someone else. if B2 had place a bid at $22, I had placed bid at $23 and then F1 and I had bid it up to $50, I should be offered the item at $23. No fraud. No motivation for Ebay to encourage this fraud. No motivation for the seller to find someone to bid up the item
