In the past an account was locked only after three sellers reported the buyer for failure to pay. Too many sellers are worried about retaliation or negative feedback to take this step, in my opinion.
The one that got away, a few years back I went to my first really big show, the csns in chicago, I had saved money for a while before and went with 2100 in my budget, I stopped at Rick Snows table and showed him my want list, he pulled out a 56 FE and offered it to me for 6500, which was about 1500 under greysheet, I have not seen one since then, much less getting one for less than wholesale.
That doesn't sound like a frivolous bidder, that sounds like shill bidding. Are most of these second-chance offers from the same seller? Also, I thought bidder IDs were anonymized independently for each auction -- in other words, I might show up as a****1 in one auction and c****b in the next; conversely, a****1 in three different auctions would refer to three different people. So, if what you're doing is comparing those anonymized strings between auctions, you're not seeing the pattern you think you're seeing.
I thought you could still see feedback numbers and colors, even with the anonymous string? At least for awhile I was able to follow certain bidders by using the feedback correlation. Also, the anonymous string used to be your first letter and then *** after that, is it now completely anonymized?
It's completely anonymized, but if you're correlating feedback figures, that does give you more information. Clicking through the anonymized ID will also show you the buyer's history with different sellers; this might help catch shills, but I'm guessing that the folks who are heavily into shilling have thought of that and worked around it. (Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a black market in third-party shilling services -- pay a subscription fee or a percentage on completed auctions, and they'll shill-bid your auctions from such a wide range of accounts that nobody will ever correlate them.)
This is how I knew my main adversary was one other buyer. He was not a shill, though, just another collector who collects what I do, (dang it).
"Anonymized" . . . I like it! No, eBay doesn't generate a different coded username for each auction . . . you can tell by logging in under someone else's account and checking for the winning bidder of all items you've won, and you'll find them all to be the same. Your's is a good idea, but may not be cost effective for eBay to employ. As for how I know who the bidder is, let that be my little secret. Also, I know that shill bidding is not going on here because I actually know this bidder, albeit only over the phone. He calls me occasionally, wanting to buy eBay coins direct. He's even called me and offered on coins he failed to bid on and learned that I purchased. He got my number from having first bought some eBay items from me a few years ago. I'm not sure why he continues to bid over the top if he's not really willing to follow through with payment . . . one day he'll meet up with a seller who will play hardball with him.
I don't see how that could be. All the IDs get anonymized to a letter or number, the asterisks, and a letter or number. That means there are only 36 * 36 = 1296 possible anonymized IDs. The total number of active eBay buyers is... well, it's a lot larger than that. Maybe I always get anonymized to the same string, but other people must be getting anonymized to that same string, too. I Googled about a bit, but didn't find much, and I'm out of time for this lunch break. Okay, your observed facts trump my speculation. But, yeah, I'd expect him to get in trouble with eBay over that kind of behavior...
There are many coded usernames that are redundant . . . there's no downside to eBay doing that. In fact, it helps eBay to further obfuscate identities if many different users end up with the same anonymous code in place of their username.
I still remember when you could see all of the bidders and their usernames. It was sort of a PIA for me at one point when I was collecting fraternity memorabilia. There was order and a hierarchy among us, once it went anonymous anyone could take the top bid and you never really knew who it was. I was the youngest and the new kid on the block so it worked out pretty well for me, and soon after the order got lost on who was bidding on what, the older guys just disappeared. Now it's like playing on a ball field with like 2 players and I've been scoring better items cheaper over the last 2-3 years. Guess they didn't like actually having to pay a full price for an item. There were many times when we would get messages through our forum about xxxx item and asking to stop bidding as it was going to the national historian or it was important to some chapter out in Wyoming. These were noble goals, but it hurt the seller and anyone else interested in the same material.
Getting back to your token Jack...well actually someone else's. Aren't you going to tell us what it was? If it's too painful to talk about, never mind. Bruce
Good question . . . I know he's had multiple different accounts, so perhaps he doesn't care about exhausting his current account if he knows he can successfully set up another.
Is it possible that he's just been changing his username? You can do that once a month -- I just changed mine, figuring that while going by my full real name was fine on the eBay of 1998, it's probably not a good idea today.
I try not to get deflated on missing out on a coin. Too many coins out there to get hung up on one. The thing I sometimes wonder about when getting outbid is how much higher would I had to have gone to be the winner? Of course there's no way of knowing someone else's max bid, but that makes me wonder sometimes.
It's rather funny how this thread came up. There's two particular coins that I needed for my collection and I have been looking for at least good three years. One of them was sold for only mere 3 dollars where I would have been happy to blow at least 20x of that! Turns out I was pretty ill that week otherwise I would have completed this extremely tough set...
Ok well thought I'd post a little follow up here... My luck turned and I won this token's little brother. Cunningham lists it as MO50a. This token is from Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. The base was established in 1826 and remained highly active until the end of World War II. Today it remains as the oldest U.S. military installation still in use, west of the Mississippi river. When I first contacted the seller I was told there was this 5¢ and a 10¢ that would be auctioned later. Happily I won the 5¢ and I'm hoping to win the 10¢.
