Belt Auction

What happened to the ebay auction on the Illinois Corn Flake?

Does anyone know? Did ebay end it? I hope the seller didn't - she could have done something constructive w/that money.......perhaps charity... and college for herself.... a car for us. Hmmm. ANyway... I was just curious if anyone knows the reason why the auction was canceled (other than it was getting out of hand).

Public Comments

1. I never heard of that one. But when the items are silly things such as a cornflake, usually people place bids just to mess around and never pay for the item. I'm guessing the seller ended the auction, or it may have been against some ebay rule..who knows. what was with the cornflake?
2. I can tell you what is most likely what happened. With so much attention and ridiculous bidding, someone came in there to bid who either hijacked someone's account to bid with or was otherwise involved in fraud. The big problem here is not the auction itself, but in eBay's method of handling it. The seller did nothing wrong, but it appears eBay really doesn't care. Of course it's great to stop the fraudsters, but why punish the sellers? With all their billions of dollars and super-smart tech people they can't figure out how to weed out the bad bidders without having to delete the whole auction? They don't even warn you! One moment it's there, the next moment *poof* it's gone. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. If I were the seller, I would use the publicity to expose eBay's callous and uncaring methods of how they deal with things. I might even try to get a lawyer to sue them. $200k is a lot of money to lose, and by now if they relist it it most likely will not go anywhere near as high. The really sad thing is there is absolutely nothing the seller could have done differently to prevent this from happening, yet they are punished the hardest. To be fair to eBay, I can't say with 100% certainty I am right in this specific case, but based on what they HAVE done to others I'm quite sure this is what happened.