Automatic bidding

[danny.boy99792012]

Yesterday and the day before I was involved in a strange occurence. First,  I never signed up for automaic bidding on an item and I found over night my bids went from $73 to $113.50. Also I certainly never wrote that my Max bid was $8000! Obviously I never typed that in either. So I was forced to retract the bid and remove myself from automatic bidding. Suddenly I was back at $113.50 and I believe i authorized it to go to $114.00. I watched it carefully and than suddenly I saw that the next bid had to exceed $116.50. But there were no other bidders. I would have been bidding against myself. So I did nothing and in the last second it said I was outbid. Yet I could see no one bidding. I felt I was cheated. Was this sell manipulating me? And how can I avoid this in the future? Because I am interested in bidding on another item.