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Shill/false Auction Bidding?


tmenyc

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This is just a heads-up ... a friend pointed out at least two ebay auctions for Sheaffers in the last two days that have sold excessively high prices and appear to have shill or false bidding determining final price, and both went to the same buyer. who has 12 buys/sells behind him/her. Most of the bids are by someone with a history of 0 or 3. The seller is l.v.vandyke . I don't have the time or inclination to research it further, but, to me, the facts of the two auctions I saw speak for themselves. Search on the seller, Sheaffer,, completed auctions; or, click on the seller name above and the two I saw are at the bottom of the page, at least as of now.

 

Tim

Edited by tmenyc

Tim

 timsvintagepens.com and @timsvintagepens

 

 

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Doesn't show up in his recent feedback. How long ago were the two transactions completed?

 

Keep in mind, though, that even if you sell to yourself an item, you'd still lose money due to PayPal and eBay fees. If he puts for sale the same pens in a couple of weeks, you can easily bust him if you take a screenshot of the auction, the fake auctioneer bidding, and mail it to eBay folks showing he's selling the same item again, with the same fake bidder again raising the prices

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In general, though it's hard to show good evidence, if a bidding pattern looks suspicious to me then I assume it is suspicious and I turn my attentions elsewhere immediately. I think with shills though there are couple of things that happen: either they bid up the final price that captures the second-chance offer at a much higher level than would normally be seen, or (and perhaps slightly more sinister) it creates a perceived desire for the item such that when similar gets listed potential buyers jump in and abandon reason because they feel it's an opportunity that may not come again.

 

Just my personal perspective, but I have a generally very low opinion of eBay sellers.

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A simpler explanation might be the presence of overenthusiastic newbies in the auction. Who has not been there?

No connection to this seller beyond purchasing a rather nice Sheaffer Vigilant about a year ago.
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IMO, this is not a lot of evidence to call someone out for shill bidding.

 

I have no connection to the seller other than as an infrequent winning bidder, but the seller has perfect feedback and many successful auctions.

Two (maybe) suspicious auctions out of almost three thousand does not worry me, but to each his own.

 

Best Regards, greg

Don't feel bad. I'm old; I'm meh about most things.

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If this is a concern report it to eBay. The fraud detection group takes the reports seriously. It should be obvious but eBay can collect a lot of information on the process that you don't see, including the source addresses of the various accounts involved in the auctions. Knowing the type of data eBay has, I would suggest it is relatively difficult to run a scam for nearly 3000 positive feed back auctions and not get detected.

 

If you want to see how good eBay is, buy a few items you are selling in another account and see what happens.

San Francisco International Pen Show - The next “Funnest Pen Show” is on schedule for August 23-24-25, 2024.  Watch the show website for registration details. 
 

My PM box is usually full. Just email me: my last name at the google mail address.

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While shill bidding is wrong, and in many places, illegal, it could be profitable, but only if one does it a certain way which I will not explain as it might give the crooks an idea of how to do it.

Why do I mention it in this context?, because the way to do it so as to benefit the seller while detectable through large scale data analysis, would not be apparent to the casual watcher of auctions.

If you see "Crazy bidding", you are seeing irrational bidding, not shill bidding. Shill bidding only is successful if the price realized is increased and the item is sold to a party outside the scheme. Pushing the bid up like a Poker Player doesn't work in an auction setting, actually the opposite as in Poker you want your opponent to drop out. In an EBay type auction you don't want the other party to drop out if you are pushing up the bid, and as you don't want the item, you logically would only push up the price of the item to a very specific and statistically slightly less than average price. It is a math problem. Take one of your pens, some ink and paper and figure it out. As I said above, I am not going to provide the answer, but I will hint, and I could produce the formula and know where the data base is to use with it.

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