seller appears to have secondary acct to raise bids on listed items

[pmwchan]

so i noticed a bider with 100% activity with a seller and has 0 feedback.....kinda fishy, yes?

[wpt05]

@pmwchan 

Shill bidding policy | eBay

"How do I report shill bidding?

If you think that another member is shill bidding, you don't need to report it to us. eBay has a number of systems in place to detect and monitor bidding patterns and practices. If we identify any malicious behavior, we'll take steps to prevent it."  

[soh.maryl]

How much bidding are we talking about here?  Like 10 items? Don't have statistics to back this up, but I would imagine there are quite a few buyers here whose purchases fit into a rather narrow niche, have found one seller whose prices they like and who ships promptly, so that's who they always buy from.

What you're suggesting is called shilling.  Feel free to report it if you are so inclined.

[mudshark61369]

@pmwchan,

 "i noticed a bider with 100% activity with a seller and has 0 feedback. ....kinda fishy".

Not neccessarily. New members tend to bid one increment at a time, reactively. (we call them nibblers)  Because of that they tend not to win auctions, until they learn how to place automatic bids. As soh.maryl wrote, there are people who like a seller and/or their low starting prices, and bid often on their auctions.  Some drop out at a certain price point, others drop out if they keep being outbid by an earlier automatic bid.

If you look at the bid history page of some of the seller's sold auctions and see last minute retractions or cancellations at the bottom of the page, then you may be right.  Especially, if the seller is located in China and starts auctions at very low prices. Though the way they do that is to have someone place an automatic bid soon after an auction starts and when the bidding gets to a certain point, that bid gets cancelled or retracted. 

You can avoid being run up by a nibble bidder or shill by placing one bid for the most you are willing to pay, in the last minute/seconds of an auction. Doing that doesn't give other bidders much time to react or does not give a seller/shill time to remove bids.  If you are outbid so be it. 

[7606dennis]

Actually, no it is not, as you say, "kinda fishy."  As every bidder on eBay starts with zero feedback and if the bidder is only bidding on this single item it would show 100% activity with this seller.  I see no evidence of shilling.  Frankly, I believe that you're accusing this seller and the bidder of criminal activity without evidence to support your allegations.

[ryanrobyn]

Ebay immediately picks up all extra acts and won't let a new bid go through. I have 4 accts with about 3500 items. Was looking for something to buy and didn't even realize the item was mine on another act. Ebay immediately stopped the bid.

[house*of*paws]

Hi @pmwchan 

Not nearly enough info to accuse someone of a crime.

[woodland_gnome · Accepted solution]

What 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 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.