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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 1341082, member: 27832&quot;]I don&#039;t think it would be hard at all. An eBay employee would see an unobscured list of bidders for every auction; that makes things a lot easier.</p><p><br /></p><p>The suspicious pattern here is:</p><p><br /></p><p>User Alice lists an item.</p><p><br /></p><p>User Bob places a bid.</p><p><br /></p><p>User Eve places a series of bids, continuing until she exceeds Bob&#039;s maximum bid. She then <i>retracts</i> that last bid, and places another one, exactly matching Bob&#039;s maximum. Since Bob bid that amount first, he gets the high bid.</p><p><br /></p><p>First of all, I can&#039;t see <i>any</i> justification other than shill bidding for this behavior. Why place a bid that you know will only <i>match</i>, not exceed, another bidder&#039;s maximum?</p><p><br /></p><p>Be that as it may, if you see that Eve is doing this same thing repeatedly on Alice&#039;s auctions, it&#039;s extremely strong evidence of collusion, whether or not Alice and Eve are connecting from the same IP or geographic location. You don&#039;t have to troll through massive logs; you just have to search for Alice&#039;s auctions that Eve bid on. I have to imagine that eBay has tools for their employees to do that with ease.</p><p><br /></p><p>Personally, I think that Eve should get NARU&#039;ed for abusing the bid-retraction facility regardless. But I just can&#039;t see any explanation for this behavior other than shill bidding. What am I missing?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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