So now that the dust has cleared, the winning bidder has bid on 42 auctions and 81% of them are with this seller. Nope, not suspicious at all.
I havent been buying on Ebay for long and I've noticed the shill bidders, I might stick to BIN listings for this reason.
I'm not sure why folks still pay attention to % of bids with particular sellers. Often I will have around 30+ percent of my bids with only 1 dealer. There are occasionally periods of time it'll be 50-70% when I'm really inactively bidding.
The two are very different. Asking a high price with full disclosure is okay. Shilling someone up to make the item look like it is worth more on the open market and devising a scheme to artificially increase the final price realized via shill bids constitutes fraud. In my book, fraudster = scammer.
Is it really a scam? Major auction houses do this exact same thing and have it in their contracts that they reserve the right to do so. The other poster was correct in that every bidder has complete control of what their max bid is
Reserving the right to bid up their own items with fake bids if they are not selling high enough? What auction house does that? Please do tell, so I can avoid them like the plague and warn others. That is a contender for #1 shadiest auction house policy I've ever heard of.
Almost all of them. It is disclosed in the terms of use/bidding when you register. The only notable exceptions (at least last time I checked) were Scotsman and Great Collections.
The keyword here is disclosure. As long as it is disclosed, there is no fraud despite the fact that I don't care for the practice. If it is not disclosed then it constitutes wire fraud.
I agree disclosure is the way to do it and the fact Great Collections doesn't is probably one of the biggest reasons they often have softer final prices. I just assume it's going to happen with a lot of eBay sellers and set my max bid and if I win I win. That's true but just because eBay doesn't allow something doesn't mean it's a scam. They ban the sale of Cuban coins as well even though it is perfectly legal. I was more or less just pointing out that shilling happens in a lot more places then just eBay and a lot of people were probably unaware of it, no matter what though as a bidder you always control what the highest amount you are willing to pay is
It's against the rules, and it's intended to deceive. Maybe that's not sufficient to define "a scam", but it's close enough for me. (In this, for once, I'm not a compulsive stickler for detail.)
