@collect247 wrote:
It's definately a scam because why would a bidder that has only bid that once with the seller decide to bid over $4K and hit the reserve immediately when they could have bid bit by bit and find out that the highest bid so far was $500 lol.
If it's a scam, it's not a very smart one, because they're not getting any money out of pushing a listing up to the reserve price.
Look at it this way - shill bidders try to put up the underbidder's amounts, so they're the ones that tend to nibble bid. They want to increase the price, but not exceed the underbidder's amount (or if they do, they don't want to exceed it so much that the genuine bidders will go, "ok, nup").
The auction has a reserve, the seller doesn't need to make sure they get at least $4k for the item because it won't sell if genuine bids don't get that high, and there would have been no point putting on a reserve if they were going to just go in and effectively set the price at $4k anyway.
It wouldn't be a bid shielder (someone who bids a very high amount to prevent others from bidding, so that at the last minute they can withdraw bids and get it cheap), because again - if the bids drop under the reserve price, the item won't sell.
Best case scenario - it's an enthusiastic bidder. Worst case scenario - someone just wanted to know what the reserve price was (or someone simply doesn't know what they're doing, lol).
