Belt Auction

Shill bidding on ebay???

Ok, so I was bidding on an item that sells for $1500 brand new. There were two more bidders on there. Their bids were $750 and $770 (first 2 bids). Then they started bidding more and it reached $1000. Then a bidder with zero feedback bid $1150 and it was too much for me -- there was like 1 minute left. I checked bidding history and it was the only bid that guy ever had; he had no bids for next 2 weeks and it remains his only bid. Is this shill bidding or did I just get beat? I just find it weird that someone bet $150 more.

Public Comments

1. Just tell ebay about it give them the item nuber and tell them what you think happened and they can check it out. if he was shill bidding and they catch him he can get kicked off ebay.
2. You need to let the bid end then offer them a second chance buy it now!
3. A submission to government and others regarding unconscionable conduct by the online auction facilitator, eBay 24 June 2008 eBay is a very large international company with such a market share of the online auction business that their behaviour has to be viewed as “monopolistic” in nature. As an eBay “junkie”, predominantly a buyer, my principal concern with eBay is their recent introduction of absolute anonymity of bidders to their Australian and, more recently, UK sites (and undoubtedly coming soon to the US). I consider this action to be unprincipled, unethical, reprehensible, even unconscionable; however you look at it, it is outrageous. eBay has now obscured auction bidding to the point that genuine bidders have got absolutely no chance of detecting and thereby protecting themselves from “shill” bidding (a criminal offence in most civilised countries) by unethical vendors. Notwithstanding eBay’s statements to the contrary, this application of absolute anonymity by eBay serves no purpose other than to deceive consumers; and the same criticism has always applied to eBay’s existing facility, “User ID kept private”—aka “the shill bidders’ stairway to paradise”. Again, notwithstanding eBay’s various pronouncements about shill bidding being banned on eBay, eBay is now knowingly “aiding and abetting” such shill bidders, at the expense of consumers. What possible reason could eBay then have for increasing the level of bidding anonymity from that of a bidder-specific level (as currently used in the US) to an absolute level? The only possible reason can be to make shill bidding “disappear”. If shill bidding cannot be detected, then genuine bidders cannot report it and, as a consequence, eBay will not have to waste any of their valuable resources pretending to do anything about it. On 26 February, on the eBay Workshop Board michelleoz@ebay.com, in anticipation, posed the following question and a response thereto: “Won’t the recent changes to ‘safeguarding member IDs’ allow more shill bidding to take place? “No—the changes will not make shill bidding any easier. “Our experience is that the detailed information [now] provided on the buyer, and how it is presented, has been more useful to members of the community who report such activity. That is, we still get good quality member reports. “Furthermore, ebay continues to monitor the back end of the site using both data provided by members and also data captured from members as they transact on the site. “And ebay continues to adapt registration and account activity rules to make the site safer overall. “Shill bidding is banned by ebay for good reasons: it hurts buyers (who see less value—one of the major drivers for internet purchases) and also hurts legitimate sellers. Any person who argues that ebay wants shill bidding to drive up revenue through inflated final value fees is way off the mark.” Space does not allow the matter to be here explored with further examples but it is apparent from many of the statements made from time to time by eBay that nowadays very little that eBay says can be accepted at face value, and the first sentence of the above answer (“No—the changes will not make shill bidding any easier.”) is a classic example of what appears to be a progression towards habitual disingenuousness—it is a patently absurd statement. Of course total bidder anonymity makes shill bidding easier—as it would so do at any personally attended live auction—just as the absolute anonymity offered by eBay’s “User ID kept private” facility has already enabled shill bidders to operate on eBay with little fear of detection—notwithstanding eBay’s dubious claim of having “sophisticated tools” for the detection of such shill bidding. And, at an attended live auction (assuming the auctioneer is not complicit in the activity—flies on the wall have been known to make bids), a shill bidder risks having to pay the auctioneer’s full selling commission and a buyer’s premium to boot; no such risk for shill-bidding sellers operating on eBay: if the supposed “buyer” does not pay then the seller pays only the nominal listing fee. Michelleoz@ebay.com, also said: “Our experience is that the detailed information provided on the buyer, and how it is presented, has been more useful to members of the community who report such activity. That is, we still get good quality member reports.” The “detailed information provided on the buyer” now supplied is, to the contrary, not more useful: you really can’t expect the majority of the sheep that graze on the eBay slopes to be interested in sifting through multiple pages of such “detailed” information to try and ascertain whether or not a competing bidder is a shill—assuming they are aware of such activity in the first place. I am certainly not interested in doing so; I prefer to be able to put a “face” on another bidder, so that I can more easily make that judgment. The supply of this “detailed information” may seem like a good idea in theory; in practice this information is an ambiguous, confusing, and pointless set of statistics: in some circumstances it can actually make a genuine bidder look like a shill. And, do please explain to me how eBay can possibly say that “Our experience is …” and that eBay “still get good quality member reports” when genuine bidders (in Australia and the UK, at least) have now effectively got absolutely no chance of detecting shill bidding activity? How does eBay prove this negative? This statement and the balance of this particular response is simply more disingenuous tosh. On the same workshop venue danieloz@ebay.com responded to a questioner who asked if there was any “publishable data to back up the claims that second chance offers are such a problem, or that shilling has not in fact increased since the introduction of “hidden” bidder IDs for bids >$250?”: “It is difficult for us to get accurate data on second chance offers because this activity happens outside of eBay’s systems and is not always reported to us. “However, I can assure you that eBay wouldn’t have lowered the limit to $0 when hiding bidder IDs if the results from the initial launch over a year ago weren’t positive. “Once again, this initiative has no impact on shill bidding. There is no correlation between hidden IDs and shill bidding.” This whole response smacks of outright disingenuousness, and if ever there was another patently absurd statement, it is the last sentence: “Once again, this initiative [the introduction of absolute anonymity] has no impact on shill bidding [and] there is no correlation between hidden IDs and shill bidding.” The form of “anonymous” alias currently in use in the US (“a***b (n)”), although comprised of two initially randomly generated characters and three interposed asterisks, is the same alias used consistently for that bidder, and when viewed in conjunction with the accompanying feedback count, “(n)”, is effectively bidder-specific and still offers a genuine bidder the opportunity to watch for suspicious patterns of bidding by individuals across a particular seller’s other auctions. On the other hand, the non-bidder-specific absolute anonymity of the form of alias now in use in Australia and the UK (“Bidder n”) is just that, totally anonymous, and serves no other purpose than to deceive the consumer. The whole bidding process, rather than being “open and transparent” as it used to be, is now “closed and opaque”. For buyers, in particular, eBay is no longer “a safe and fun place to trade.” eBay claims that absolute anonymity of bidders was introduced to stop fraudulent “second chance offers” being sent by direct email to underbidders. This reason is disingenuous in the extreme. This supposed problem could have been better controlled by other means—and indeed has so been controlled with the recent blocking of access to underbidders’ direct email addresses. Further, generally, a member can now only contact another member via the eBay messaging system, so it is not now possible for anyone (including scammers) to ascertain who another member is (or their direct email address) if that member does not want to disclose such details. And, it is not now possible to contact any but the winning bidder of an auction as the winning bidder’s “contactable” member ID is the only ID disclosed at the end of an auction. So, apart from what would appear to be another nonsensical and disingenuous claim by eBay that there was a problem with scammers “guessing” members’ email addresses from members’ IDs, there is, in fact, no need for any increase in the level of anonymity at all; and there certainly is no need for the level of absolute anonymity, that we in Australia and the UK now suffer: (again) that level of anonymity serves only to deceive the consumer. eBay apparently claims that they are only a “notice board provider on which members post notices”—surely, another absurd and disingenuous contention, as it is they who make all the rules by which member must play and it is they who have created the totally anonymous bidding structure, here complained of, that now enables shill-bidding sellers to mercilessly “rip off” buyers without fear of detection. eBay apparently also suggests that as simply a “notice board provider” they are not subject to any regulation (indeed, I suspect that they are terrified of the possibility of any such regulation) and that therefore they can apply whatever conditions and processes that suit them, without any consideration to the effect on consumers. So, it appears that all an unethical trader has to do to avoid an “Office of Fair Trading” is to put a “notice board provider” between themselves