Shill bidding

[ospreyoutdoors67]

Does the last two bids on these listings look fishy? Same feedback ratings but different bidders. Same time, amount and same model of item. 

[aeparts1]

"Does the last two bids on these listings look fishy"

Well, they are auctions for fishing lures, so of course it looks fishy.

[soh.maryl]

In what way?

[postcardcountry]

I see what you are saying, I think.  You have 4 items with the same three buyers bidding.

If you notice, the higher feedback buyer bid first, the lower out bid the higher.

Shill bidding?  I don't know.  I do see that the 'buyer' ids have change with each bid so it's really hard to tell.

[nobody*s_perfect]

It doesn't look like shill bidding to me, just 3 buyers who really like that seller's items. Shill bidders don't want to win the auction, just drive up the price.  A seller with nearly 400,000 feedback has an established reputation and doesn't need to mess around with risky bidding. His feedback score is far lower than his total feedback received, which shows that many buyers purchase more than one item.  

When eBay camouflages a bidder's true ID, they usually choose two characters that are in the ID, but apparently they aren't consistent from one auction to the next.

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@postcardcountry wrote: ....  I do see that the 'buyer' ids have change with each bid so it's really hard to tell.

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I looked up two of the listings and checked the bidder details.  Their percent of transactions with this seller ranges from 46% to 95% and the profiles are the same in different auctions, which shows that the users are the same members even though the camouflaged IDs are different.

[albertabrightalberta]

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@postcardcountry wrote:

I see what you are saying, I think.  You have 4 items with the same three buyers bidding.

If you notice, the higher feedback buyer bid first, the lower out bid the higher.

Shill bidding?  I don't know.  I do see that the 'buyer' ids have change with each bid so it's really hard to tell.

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I'm usually pretty good at differentiating between shilling and non-shill-bidding but this one is tricky. 

I see a bidder with 95% of bids on this seller's items, another with 74% of bids on this seller's items and a third with 73%. There are several other bidders who have between 35% and 50% of their bidding with him. 

Personally, I wouldn't buy from this seller.

[nobody*s_perfect]

Why would a seller recruit multiple shill bidders for one auction, to bid against each other? To me, it just looks like this seller is the go-to source for these buyers' lures.

[soh.maryl]

How do the buyer's IDs change with each bid?

If it's a different ID, does that not indicate a different bidder?

[albertabrightalberta]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

Why would a seller recruit multiple shill bidders for one auction, to bid against each other? To me, it just looks like this seller is the go-to source for these buyers' lures.

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Without trying to hijack the thread or go too OT, it's something I've seen many times from handbag/accessories sellers. (I claim ignorance about fishing lures so I don't know what's "normal" in that category.)

Here are 5 examples of 5 different shills from ONE listing and one seller. To be clear, this particular seller has other shills, many with higher feedback numbers. 

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@soh.maryl wrote:

How do the buyer's IDs change with each bid?

If it's a different ID, does that not indicate a different bidder?

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As you know, eBay shows the bidders' real full IDs only to the bidders themselves and to the seller. Everybody else sees a camouflaged ID which consists of two letters and/or numbers separated by three asterisks.  

The examples provided in the original post show that the camouflaged IDs can vary from one listing to another.  It's the same member, but they were assigned different a***b camouflaged IDs in each listing.

[eburtonlab]

Those are almost certainly all the same three bidders in each auction; eBay anonymizes the usernames, and the same username may appear as a different scrambled username on different pages, but the feedback ratings are the same and high enough that they are unlikely to be distinct bidders bidding the same amount on similar items.

One bidder bids at or near the opening amount, one bidder bids $13.05, and one bidder bids more than that, which bumps the bid amount up to one increment above the $13.05 amount.

Nothing appears suspicious about those bids at all. No apparent indications of shilling, some contraindications -- such as high feedback numbers.

[eburtonlab]

I see a bidder with 95% of bids on this seller's items, another with 74% of bids on this seller's items and a third with 73%. There are several other bidders who have between 35% and 50% of their bidding with him.

30-day totals are not necessarily indicative of much; there have been times when I have bid on a bunch of individual items from one particular seller where an examination of my 30-day totals would show 90%+ of my bids were with that one seller. If a buyer mostly uses buy-it-now or  rarely bids on auctions except in large batches, it is very easy to get such numbers. Likewise if the seller rarely bids, but nibble bids on one or more auctions from the same seller.

Sellers that are unscrupulous enough to use shill accounts tend to use very low feedback accounts and often spread the bids around to make such comparisons much more difficult to spot, since a very low feedback number rarely stands out in a bid history.

[woodland_gnome]

When SMI (including the a***b aliases) was first rolled out the alias was the same for the same user for all pages at the same time (it was subject to change from time to time but the change would be to all pages at the same time).   A couple of years ago they started having different aliases on different types of pages (one for main bid history, another for the seller's Feedback Profile, then another for the cancellation and retractions display, and then a different one when you clicked on the alias to get the 30 day bidding stats for that bidder which makes absolutely no sense and just confuses things).  

When it was first rolled out eBay communicated in the forums to let us know what was going on and why.  Now everything is secret.