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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Hookman, post: 3261045, member: 99642&quot;]Yes, I agree. Shill bidding. Friends or hired bidders, making bids simply to drive up the final price.</p><p><br /></p><p>There&#039;s another seller I&#039;ve bought from recently who I suspect is guilty of the shill.I won&#039;t give his name because I can&#039;t prove it.&nbsp; It just seems odd that no matter what my bid is on his coins, someone pushes my bid to my max and then stops. Never passes me, just to exactly my max. And I bid odd numbers on purpose, bids like xxxx.23 or xxx.56 or xxx.77. It goes right to my max, then stops and I end up paying whatever my max is. It would be less suspicious if they actually beat me for the coin, but nope, right to my max , then stop.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I checked the bid lists like you just showed, I found the same thing. The same bidder, over and over, doing lots of bidding but seldom, if ever, winning.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And let me tell you, eBay DOES NOT CARE !! eBay&#039;s money increases with each higher bid. Shill bidding increases eBay&#039;s profits, not the other way around.</p><p>To stop it, you would have to prove that eBay knew about, allowed it, encouraged it, etc., which of course we can&#039;t do.</p><p>So my eBay strategy is to be very careful buying from the long-term established eBay sellers. Period.</p><p>When I suspect something, I switch sellers.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another peeve is descriptions. I just argued with a seller last night and today about his habit of describing cupro-nickel coins as Silver Half Dollar size or Silver Dollar size, written in such a way that it looks like he&#039;s saying the coin is silver. He does this with foreign coins, especially Arabic coins, that are hard to look up. Little did he know that I&#039;ve been teaching myself some Arabic and Japanese number reading so I can actually tell what the coin is. Today, when I confronted him about it, he actually admitted purposely using the word silver as a magnet to draw bidders. He says the word &quot;Silver&quot; is the most searched word on eBay and that&#039;s why he does it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Just always remember the old saying &quot; Buyer Beware &quot;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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