Shill Bidding

[dinojojo905]

I suspected Sellers practicing shill bidding for some time and I sent 1 Seller a screenshot of the page I reported them to eBay and he was bold enough to relist the item within 24 hours at a set price which I also sent off to eBay. Another Seller when confronted exclaimed “just trying to make a buck”. I have 100% perfect feedback and have been a customer for 16 years! This is eBays playpen and if they want to allow this activity I will take my business to another less shady platform. I have canceled all my current bids and will no longer be doing my business with eBay! NO ONE LIKES TO BE FOOLED!!! Unfortunately I highly doubt eBay will ever correct this situation but I can make 1 suggestion TRUST YOUR GUT!!!

[kathiec]

You won't get any different answers on this post than you did on the one you posted two days ago. I've been on eBay for 26 years and also have 100% feedback -- all buyers do, because positive feedback is all we can receive. I've also been active in the forums for 16 years. And in that time I've seen hundreds of people complaining about shilling, and it's actually been shilling in less than 1% of those cases. Not saying that shilling never happens, just that most people don't really know what to look for.

Ebay does know, however, and has ways to detect it, such as VPN tracking, not available to us. Since shilling is a crime both federally and in all 50 states, I can assure you that eBay seriously investigates claims of it.

If you'd like to post an item number of a listing you think was shilled we'll be happy to look at the bidding history and see if shows the signs. 

[woodland_gnome]

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 succesful 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 postives 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.

[ms.orchid]

Unfortunately, this behaviour has been going on here since I first started on eBay in March of 1998. I doubt they'll ever get rid of it since they make money off of this. 😕