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Bid Cancellation Scam
Old-school (1999) seller returning to eBay after long hiatus. I've noticed that the new liberalized offer cancellation policy has led to a new scam from buyers. In the last month, this has happened three times. For two of them, I was able to cancel the auction before it ended. Here is how it works:
1) An auction for an item (actual value for demonstration purposes $30) starts out with a low starting price. It receives a few bids in the early days, going up to maybe $5.00.
2) A fraudulent bidder comes along and bids a wildly high amount, like $50.00. With a second account, they bid $51.00. Now the price exceeds what a normal buyer would pay for a $30.00 item.
3) From that point on, no other buyers can place bids within the reasonable ($5.00 to $30.00) range, because that price has been exceeded. The system won't allow a buyer to bid anything less than $50.00, which no reasonable buyer would do for a $30 item.
4) Most buyers stop watching the item and move on. No new buyers follow it, either.
5) As late as possible, the fraudster cancels their high bid. The price drops back down to $5.00.
6) With no new bidders, and buyers no longer watching the item, it generates very little interest before selling at a vastly below-market-value price.
7) Success! The scammers win again.
Now that this has happened three times, my only reaction has been to cancel the auction and ban both user accounts from accessing my listings again. But this needs to be done. Sadly, eBay Customer Service doesn't even have a way of reporting bidders who aren't the winning buyer.
There needs to be a way to report suspected fraudulent accounts. Surely if you provided two customer names, the system would be able to quickly compare IP addresses, location codes, time stamps, etc. to come up with a reasonable probability of fraud.
kh-christelle
·9 months agoHi everyone,
Due to the age of this thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.
Thank you for understanding.
yokashsan
·9 months agoI am very sorry OP you have been given some of the most USELESS answers I have ever seen on a forum.
Ebay is completely INCOMPETENT for allowing this Bid Shielding Scam to continue to occur.
When you have scammers who can hijack hundreds of eBay accounts and proceed to utilize 2 accounts to artificially bid up an auction only to RETRACT their high bid at the VERY LAST SECOND so their other account wins it for pennies on the dollar then you have a MASSIVE problem.
Ebay should not allow last second bid retractions. Accounts with 100+ bid retractions in the last month.
Unfortunately even after reporting this dozens of times, eBay does absolutely NOTHING to stop this.
The only thing I recommend is setting a reserve price for auctions with a reasonable value to prevent this sort of scam from occuring. Other than that, don't count on the lazy eBay programmers from stopping this with a simple line of code.
mam98031
·1 year ago@oat_351
Why cancel the auctions? Just cancel that misbehaving buyer's bids. Put them on your BBL and let the auction run till it closes. You likely don't have to give up the sales on these items.
12345jamesstamps
·1 year agoI think I had the 'same bidder' in the past when I did auctions...LOL.
I was able to cancel a number of his bids on auctions when I got like 20+ retractions from 2 bidders on the last day.
Still, bidder won some auctions...had 2 eBay account names...but it had same mailing address with 2 different account names.
Called him out on it..got excuses.
Needless to say it was from another country...I ended blocking the whole country...LOL
A bidder like this can have friends galore who might help him. Hate to have blocked an entire country but it was a lot of items that went for almost nothing.
I usually look at bidder's retractions now when I bid on auctions...I have seen a bidder with 500+ retractions on bids plus others with not as many...thus...I won't bid on the auctions.
As a seller doing auctions...the seller needs to look at bidders several times a day...blocking a bidder before auction ends or even canceling bids.
eBay allowing a bidder to have 500+ bid retractions and does nothing about it...so very sad!
stainlessenginecovers
·1 year agoPost #3 is the answer
Post #3 is the answer
I repeated it in case you didn't hear/see it the 1st or 2nd time.
Then, there is NO scam.
mam98031
·1 year agoI get it that you clearly think that is the answer. But some sellers like to and/or want to do auctions. They have every right to do them if they want to. Not a darn thing wrong with it.
The OP does not have to change their business plan to fix their issue they came her about. All they need to do when they see a buyer bidding like this, is to cancel that buyer's bids, then put them on their BBL. Let the auction run to close and sell to someone else. The seller @oat_351 doesn't have to lose a dime.
oat_351
OP1 year agoI appreciate all of the feedback. Differing opinions are a good thing.
For my higher-value comic books, I used a fixed price listing because I wanted more control. If I couldn't get the price I wanted, I just canceled the listing and kept the book. No big deal.
For lower-grade, less-desirable books, I just threw them into auction lots and accepted the result. If things were fair and honest, that was fine. It was when someone was clearly gaming the system to manipulate the sale price well below fair price...that's when I have a problem.
Most of my best stuff is now sold. I'm now staring down the barrel of about 500 Spider-Man and X-Men comics that average maybe $5 a book. Not worth individual sales, so I'm going to have to bunch them in lots and take whatever price I can get. If fixed-price listings are successful, great. If I have to use auctions to just get them out of the door, so be it.
mam98031
·1 year agoI stopped doing auctions years ago because their usefulness became useless. Things I sold just didn't sell well enough anymore. Pre 2014 I was running about 500 auctions a week. I had good success with them too until the start of the 2nd quarter of 2014. I haven't tested them again for awhile, but I use to every now and then.
I respect that the auction format can be extremely useful to some sellers. One of the biggest complaints sellers of auctions had was getting some buyers to pay. It took Ebay a couple of decades, but they finally implemented a solution for that, which is represented by the newer requirement in your Buyer Requirements that you can use if you want. Doesn't help with Cancellation, but it can with Non Payers in general.
If you decide to use the requirement to provide a payment source before bidding, keep in mind that buyers have one hour AFTER the auction closes to change or adjust the payment info. They can't delete it, just change it to a different payment source or adjust their ship to address.
ittybitnot
·1 year ago@oat_351
What you are describing is known as "bid shielding". It has been going on for years and years. Now that buyer ID's are masked, even if you suspect the activity on your own listing (because you can see the member ID), you can't see what else they may be bidding on to gain evidence of the shielding in other circumstances.
Even if you can convince a regular outsourced foreign call center customer service rep you get in a call back or chat, they likely can't do anything about it even if they do know what you are talking about.
I would contact eBay via one of the social media portals and tell them you suspect Id A and Id B are engaged in bid shielding, and you would like to know the proper procedure for next time. They have not been totally replaced by AI bots yet, and are actual eBay employees in the US. As others suggest, you are playing a dangerous game by using the "cancel" feature and the defects that often result for the seller that does this. Generally speaking, there is no way to prevent it happening to you, but you need to know the proper procedure when it happens.
ssateneth
·1 year agoif you know the item is worth $30, why dont you list it for $30 buy it now? auctions are a waste of time.
what you encountered is called bid shielding, and it is against terms of service. bidders doing this should be reported to get banned.
kensgiftshop
·1 year agoIf it's a $30 item, why start the auction at $5?
Start it at the price you'll accept in case you only get 1 bid.
luckythewinner
·1 year agoAn auction for an item (actual value for demonstration purposes $30)
When an item has a known actual value, IMHO the auction format is a poor choice.
When an item has a known actual value AND you are encountering bidding shenanigans, IMHO the auction format is a very poor choice.
IMHO sellers stand a much better chance if they adjust to the reality on the ground than by hoping that eBay will change.
onefootflipper
·1 year agoEbay hasn't been about actual auctions in at least 10 years, probably more like 15.
I sell full time and I have only auctioned 2 items on ebay in the last 4 years and only one of those got paid for.
Don't use auction format.
dbfolks166mt
·1 year agoEbay hasn't been about actual auctions in at least 10 years, probably more like 15. For most items that is true but it depends on what you are selling.
I sell full time and I have only auctioned 2 items on ebay in the last 4 years and only one of those got paid for.
Don't use auction format.
I use the auction format almost exclusively but do so for time management reasons. I am not a full time seller so once I have an auction started, and I don't use OBO, I am free to do whatever else I wish during the week such as fish, hunt, hike, go camping, visit family and friends.
I also happen to like the auction format as a buyer and it is how I do a LOT of my sourcing although not much on eBay. I like the fact that a lot of buyers don't like the auction format it keeps the sourcing competition down.
fern*wood
·1 year agoI don't often use auctions, but that would certainly annoy me if I did. Since you state you haven't sold in awhile, I hope you are up to date with current rules concerning cancellations. If not, I'd read up on them and check your dashboard in case you are receiving defects for doing so. They can really mess a selling account up.
buyselljack2016
·1 year agosolutions.
fixed price with IPR for the items that you know the value of.
start auctions at, or close to the desired amount. If you want way more than $X, just don't start an auction at $X
bonjourami
·1 year agoI hope you know that canceling transactions is the kiss of death for sellers on Ebay.If you used oos for those cancellations, you received a defect for each one.
oat_351
OP1 year agoMy defect rate is currently 0.00% but thanks for the warning.
I've had about 70 fixed price sales, and the 30 or so auctions have gone smoothly, but those three with fake cancellations where someone was clearly using a second account to rig the system. In each case I have banned the users.
eBay has no customer service to speak of, and never has. I started back in the postal money order era of 2001 and even back then there was no possible way to contact eBay for any problems.
mam98031
·1 year ago@bonjourami
Cancelling Bids is totally different from Cancelling a transaction. The seller can cancel bids without any negative affect to their selling account.