@gimegimeyogo wrote:
I think you all are missing the mark here. This seller shill bids to a level whereby he is happy to sell. If this works in half the trades then he/she is well in front and the buyers are being screwed half the time paying an inflated price. I have been buying and selling jewellery on Ebay for years. The reason the bargain line has dried up is because there are less and less Mun and Dad sellers on ebay these days. It has become an environment for retailers and wholesalers to turn over their obsolete old stock or develop an optional cashflow market. Ebay loves it because they are only interested in turnover dollars. The more sold, the more they make. They have changed the payment environment totally since their acquisition of Paypal and now make another 1-2% commission out of every trade in addition to increasing selling commission fees 400% over 8 years. It's just business, we all know that. What is unfair are sellers that artificially inflate auction prices by employing tactics such as shill bidding!!
Ebay cut ties with PayPal last year some time.
I'm not suggesting for a minute that there is not shill bidding going on with the seller you are referring to, however, even if they are doing it and it's only working in half the trades, they are still quite pathetic at it. If they were genuinely shilling, then the bid for the shilling account would be cancelled at the last minute, so as not to win the auction. When the shilling account wins the auction, the seller has 2 options. Cancel the sale, or wear the fees. As shilling is usually a money grab, it's unlikely they will wear the fees. If they cancel too many transaction, eBay aren't going to be too happy about it.
Sometimes it can appear strange if the same buyer keeps winning a sellers auction. There is one seller I regularly win auctions from and depending on what they have listed, I could win all of their auctions (they mostly run buy it now listings and put up around 10 auctions a week). If anyone looked at the bidding history of those auctions, they would see the same person bidding and winning repeatedly.
It is hard to prove shilling these days with anonymous ID's. It's also made harder by more people using a VPN. That said, the shilling accounts would have to have been created using the VPN and then only accessed when it's turned on. The instant they open the account without the VPN, the true IP address is recorded and can be checked, even if all future access is done with the VPN on. If they had multiple shilling accounts, they would need to have multiple devices running at the same time. Even the most diligent person can stuff up and open the wrong account on the wrong device. Eventually all accounts will be linked by IP addresses.
I have reported so many blatant attempts at shill bidding. All eBay did was not allow them to run auctions for a month. One was so bad at it, the accounts she was using had very similar names, e.g bluebird1 and bluebird2 (not real ID's, just made them up for the purpose of the example). Each time she'd create a new selling account, the accounts would buy from each other to inflate the feedback, which is how I knew what the account names were. EBay even admitted they could see that with the feedback and did nothing. As far as I'm aware, this member is still committing fraud on a daily basis. I gave up trying as it was doing my head in. None of the other members I reported were affected in any way and are probably also committing fraud daily.
