What Some People Do To Jack Up The Bids On Ebay!

A little blatant "bidding on your own stuff" that I came across. Looks like he could not resist since he wasn't getting the price he wanted. Look up the item number and you will see that the .***n (2) appears to be the seller. The $250 bid was an automatic bid I uncovered. I guess he is desperate.

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=121692552698&showauto=true

 

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No, no no. Please people.. stop thinking you know more about ebay than you do. You cannot bid on your own item with your own name. And look at the bidder you think he is. It has a period in it. The seller name does not. Just, no.

 

Ive always been a little suspicious of sellers on ebay but i think you need two separate accounts that cant be connected to each other and even then im not sure.

 

While I do not know the rules of ebay and bidding - I do stuff like that all the time. I might bid once and it not be high enough. Then I bid again to see where I stand. In some cases I might even go a third bid. Just did this on a coin the lcs had on ebay - I still lost. I think my third bid was 18 and it closed over a hundred. And even some occasions I bid the first time and will be high, then get outbid - then I bid more. I typically do not win these type auctions because I am trying to get some real bargains. I do this even more on heritage. I am just glad I do not have to pay for losing bids - I have a lot of those this year. Heck even some of my serious bids get blown out of the waters.

And what do you know - the current high bidder even had a retracted bid. Just enough to be high. And with 22 hours to go I am not sure the seller would have done anything. I have seen $10 bid on coin go to over 1000 in the last few seconds of bidding. There was one about 4/5 years back I was watching - I just knew I could steal it at $500 and it was only around 14 or 15 bucks. With 4 seconds to go I click bid - well heck my bid did not take because it was up to like $1100 dollars.


I am not sure anything nefarious is going on for this auction.

 

Ebay has automated checks on this sort of thing that often catch insider/self bidding.Not always, of course, but the penalty if you get caught doing it can be severe - if you consider banishment or suspension severe.

 

There is a lot of "Shill" bidding on Ebay. Very easy to do and Ebay does a poor job of of trying to stop it.

 

And as the original poster just made clear, there are a lot of people who think shill bidding is going on when it is not.

 

I don't mean to be sarcastic, but Ebay's checks on shill bidding is about the same as their checks for fake coins being sold.

 

Why would a 4 feedback seller show up as a 2 feedback bidder?

IMO, you're dreaming if you think that the seller bid on his own stuff since feedback numbers are constant.

I've verified that if I had 2058 feedback back in May that when I go back and look at that listing it shows todays feedback.

And for the record, if a "bidder" has the same IP address as the seller, the seller gets Naru'ed to think it over. This happened to Mad<arty over on the CU Forums with items he was selling back around 2008. He used his lap top to create the listings then logged off. His buddy borrowed his laptop to login and bid on Marty's items. Same IP address showed up in eBays audit files and Marty got a weeks vacation for supposed shill bidding.

Now, its not impossible to have two separate IP providers coming into the same household or business which would generate different IP addresses but who does that?

 

When the original poster first posted this, they both had 2 feedback. You could still tell it was not him thought, because he did not have a period in his name, and the bidder did.

 

Huh? The OP posted an eBay link. The feedback in the ebay link would exactly match the sellers feedback. Once a listing closes, eBay doesn't "freeze" the account feedbacks for those that bid. Those references are dynamic according to whatever the current feedback for the ids are. If the under bidder was the seller and the sellers current feedback is 4 then "4" would be reflected in the underbidders feedback.

Check your current feedback numbers on eBay.

If you've received feedback within the past 30 days, pull up a listing that you won more than 30 days ago. You'll see that the feedback number for you as the winning bidder will exactly match your current feedback number.

 

What I am saying is... when this was originally posted several days ago, both seller and bidder had 2 feedback, so he thought they were the same person. Once you checked it, seller had 4 feedback, and bidder still had 2, so it was obvious it was different people.

 

Why would they care? They're getting the listing, and the final value fees! They're happy.

 

There's certain places online sellers can pay and then have an endless supply of accounts bid on their auctions for them or simply buy feedback for that matter. Sometimes the shill bidding is pretty obvious other times not so much.

 

Do you have any links for these "places" ?

 

Use google to find info on it via certain 'black hat' forums that aren't too deep. There's also hundreds of listings on certain market places like Agora for not only buying feedback but bids, hijacked accounts as well as anything else you could possibly want.

 

When a "seller" has a listing end and then the coin shows back up on that sellers account, I "might" think shill understanding that some buyers DO return what they've purchased.

If a seller has a consistent supply of "returned" coins then I would strongly suspect shilling.

However, what a lot of the "mob" fails to consider is that a shill bid that produces a win costs the seller the final value fee's and any possible listing fee's. That's real money so even though it is possible to come up with methods to shill your own auctions, it can also be very costly.

 

Yea I would love to sell something on Ebay and bid up my own item so I can win it and give eba the 10 percent

 

Again, not exactly true. I have had many no pays and returns that get relisted. Also, if someone shill bids their own auction, they simply cancel the sale if they win. Then they pay no selling fees, and relist.

 

Never thought about canceling the listing. Good Point.