@cadet_orange wrote:
Selling an item like normal. Getting bids like normal. New bidder with account created less than a month ago and 0 rep bids, no biggie, I had one like this a few months ago and it turned out fine. Other bidder makes a play to win item and loses against the auto bid of the new player. The bid is now 30% higher than my buy it now price. My concern is this is a fake account which is auto bidding to ridiculous amounts and wont end up actually paying for the item. Is this common these days?
Well, it's a common tactic (bid shielding), though I don't know if it's more or less prevalent than it used to be.
The account of interest in your auction is not really the leader but the guy in second place, the one who's made all those bids in a purported attempt to get past the leader. He has made 12 bid retractions in his recent past (go to his Feedback page and select the Feedback as a Buyer tab to find his bid retraction count, right side of page about halfway down), and if he retracts his bids in this auction, the price for the zero-feedback current leader will collapse back down to $142.50 (the second-place bidder's high bid, plus one increment). (I think he'll have to retract no less than one hour from the end of the auction.)
While the current price is higher than whatever your BuyItNow price was, the BIN goes away when bids are received, so no one beyond the first bidder would have had the chance to buy it outright.
