Shield Scams

[daneiac]

are they prevalent? a bidder sets up two accounts, with one account he bids the lowest amount on an item worth $1,000.00 say a starting bid of $50.00 ?.. lots of sellers running auctions start at an absurdly low starting bid to attract attention and bids.. makes it look like more activity with musch interest.. but this unscrupulous scam bidder has a secound account that bids an overly high amount of say, $3,000.00 on this item up for auction that is worth $1,000.00, so nobody else bids and the crook wins a $1,000.00 dollar item for $50.00,, what is to protect sellers running auctions then? ..bid by proxy has it's downfalls..

[18704d]

If a seller puts a 1000 dollar item up

with a 50 dollar starting price,

they have to be willing to sell at 50.

If a bidder bids 50 dollars, then 3000 dollars on an item,

and there are no other bidders, like you say

The auction will only show 50 dollars bid.

Lynn

[thallidguy]

They happen less often than some people think (I say this as someone who has been on these boards off and on for years).

The way you describe is actually the dumb way to do it because it would be very easy for eBay to detect. Shill bidding is a policy violation and people have been suspended for it. If it's a dummy account set up by the seller himself, eBay knows that they are linked.

It's harder to detect when a separate party is the shill, but even then eBay has drawn inference through things like family connections, living at the same address.

[a_c_green]

Shill bidding is done on behalf of the seller, not the buyer. What's being described here is bid shielding, where a fake, artificially-high bid is posted, followed by a second bid (from another account) which serves to push the price up to some ludicrous level, showing how high the lead bidder really is. At the very end of the auction, either the lead or the second-place bid quickly retracts, the price falls to whatever the third-place price was plus one increment, and the auction is won at a much lower price.

While it might be hard to spot bid shielding when it's in progress, you should at least set your opening price to be whatever you would genuinely accept to sell it for if you only ever got one bid, and then everything above that point is gravy.

[partial*eclipse]

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@daneiac wrote:

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 ... this unscrupulous scam bidder has a secound account that bids an overly high amount of say, $3,000.00 on this item up for auction that is worth $1,000.00, so nobody else bids and the crook wins a $1,000.00 dollar item for $50.00....

In that case, the high bid showing would be $51, unless the higher bidder retracted his bid.

 This sort of shenanigans is less common since eBay instituted the "12-hour rules" so that bids cannot be retracted during the final 12 hours of an auction, except within an hour of being placed.

[woodyscollectibles]

If you have ever bought bullion on Ebay that goes on there all the time. That's why I quit buying auctions. I only buy from people with set price that will except offers. Merry X-Mas...............

[thatsallfolks]

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@daneiac wrote:

are they prevalent? a bidder sets up two accounts, with one account he bids the lowest amount on an item worth $1,000.00 say a starting bid of $50.00 ?.. lots of sellers running auctions start at an absurdly low starting bid to attract attention and bids.. makes it look like more activity with musch interest.. but this unscrupulous scam bidder has a secound account that bids an overly high amount of say, $3,000.00 on this item up for auction that is worth $1,000.00, so nobody else bids and the crook wins a $1,000.00 dollar item for $50.00,, what is to protect sellers running auctions then? ..bid by proxy has it's downfalls..

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The example you’re trying to construct would require both accounts to bid a large amount, causing the price to be unreasonably high. That would scare other bidders away. Then one of them would retract.

ebay made this more difficult, but not impossible, by restricting retractions in the last 12 hours. 

[luckythewinner]

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@daneiac wrote:

are they prevalent? a bidder sets up two accounts, with one account he bids the lowest amount on an item worth $1,000.00 say a starting bid of $50.00 ?.. lots of sellers running auctions start at an absurdly low starting bid to attract attention and bids.. makes it look like more activity with musch interest.. but this unscrupulous scam bidder has a secound account that bids an overly high amount of say, $3,000.00 on this item up for auction that is worth $1,000.00, so nobody else bids and the crook wins a $1,000.00 dollar item for $50.00,, what is to protect sellers running auctions then? ..bid by proxy has it's downfalls..

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1) In the example you gave, the high bid would show $51 and would not deter anyone from bidding on the auction. If the item was really worth $1,000 then other bidders would come along and bid it up. 

2) In order for the second account to "shield" the item at $3,000, the first account would need to bid $2,950 in order to trigger the automatic proxy bidding fromt eh second account.

And in your scenario, the second account would have to retract the $3,000 bid at least 12 hours in advance - dropping the high bod from the first account back down to $50.  Again, if the item was really worth $1,000 then other bidders would probably come along in those 12 hours and bid it back up. 

So while it might be possible to use this strategy to shield an item for most of the auction duration, the 12 hour window at the end is probably long enough for the bidding to recover at least somewhat. 

But in the big picture, if this were a widespread problem on eBay then certainly a few sellers over the past several months (or years) would have come here to report it happening to them - and I can't recall any sellers reporting this as something that happened to them. 

[thatsallfolks]

There have been several recent threads with links to auctions where the shielded will retract and re-bid every hour in the last 12 hours, to take advantage of the 1-hour window for retractions.

[tama314]

solution is simple-- Ebay ought to bar all bid retractions. Why would anyone ever really need to retract a bid anyway? "mistake?" nonsense.  If anyone ever retracts a bid on one of our items for any reason-- their name goes right to our block list.

[tama314]

defending shield scammers? Lovely. Congratulations.

[tama314]

the subject is shield bidding not shill bidding. Its easy to spot shield bidding. Its the guy that posits a ridiculously high bid and cancels it in the last minute.

[mr_lincoln]

@daneiac   That's not how Auctions on eBay work ... in your scenario the Buyer would actually need 3 IDs and have 2 of them bid up to those high dollar amounts.  Then, they would have to ASK THE SELLER to cancel their bids on 2 IDs at the end so that the low bid would be the only one remaining from their 3 IDs ...

Sellers do NOT have to honor the request to Cancel. 

But to your point, eBay pushes to have Sellers think they need to start their Auctions at a low price giving them the impression they will attract more Buyers and lots of bids ... errrnt,

I price Auctions the same way I would a Fixed Priced item ... one bid and I make a profit, more bids and more profit.

[luckythewinner]

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@tama314 wrote:
the subject is shield bidding not shill bidding. Its easy to spot shield bidding. Its the guy that posits a ridiculously high bid and cancels it in the last minute.

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 eBay does not allow bidders to cancel bids in the last minute. They must do it at least 12 hours before the end of the auction.

[jeannicho22]

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@daneiac wrote:

are they prevalent? a bidder sets up two accounts, with one account he bids the lowest amount on an item worth $1,000.00 say a starting bid of $50.00 ?.. lots of sellers running auctions start at an absurdly low starting bid to attract attention and bids.. makes it look like more activity with musch interest.. but this unscrupulous scam bidder has a secound account that bids an overly high amount of say, $3,000.00 on this item up for auction that is worth $1,000.00, so nobody else bids and the crook wins a $1,000.00 dollar item for $50.00,, what is to protect sellers running auctions then? ..bid by proxy has it's downfalls..

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IMHO, shill bidding happens all day, every day.  It used to be easier to detect when others could see buyer IDs, and while bidding patterns will still make others suspect, there is no way of proving it.  Shill bidding is illegal and eBay is bound to prevent it even though shill bidding can make then a lot of money.  But with no way for anyone to prove it, even if suspected, others cannot force eBay to do anything about it.  Like so many other answers we see from eBay to complaints of wrong doing, everything is done behind the screen and no one actually knows if it was acted upon or not.... until it shows up in the news.

When I first started on eBay I was bid up by a shill... proved and had the buyer/seller removed from eBay.  Now my answer is to snipe or don't bid.  If I want it badly enough, yes, I will get up in the middle of the night to bid on it.  I used to use a proxy sniper, but things have become undependable with many of them.  If I want it badly enough, yup, I will do it the old fashion way.