Low feedback or fishy bid patterns.  You are right, however, with the hidden bidder "feature," it is more difficult to discern that sort of stuff.  Look at the feedback of the seller, if the same item was listed previously and won by a low feedback buyer and is now mysteriously listed again (assuming some uniqueness to the item).  Feedback tracking and back-tracking is normally the best way to figure out stuff like that.  Here at The Acaeum, there are some real persistant folks when it comes to digging out information from past feedback.

For the specific auction in question, I don't see anything out of the ordinary there.  Normal bidding, then K-O (4) puts in a bid to take the lead.  A day later, a bigger bid is put in, putting the price at $76.  Another high feedback bidder puts in $85, is immediately outbid, goes for $92, outbid again, gives up (or waits to snipe).  K-O (4) checks his email, sees he was outbid, takes another look and throws up $100, but is immediately outbid, throws in another bid and takes the lead.  Now the only question is, will the #2 bidder go higher, will somebody else jump in, etc.  K-O is the suspect, with the low feedback, but their behavior seems typical to me for a bidder.

Bottom line in this case - why would an experienced eBayer with 100% feedback (the seller) shill an item that is getting a pretty good deal of action from multiple sources?  Really he risks the hassle of buying back his own stuff, potentially getting thrown off eBay (not actually sure how they deal with shills) for only a few extra bucks.  If he really wanted to absolutely maximize his profit, he would have listed the Core Rules as a separate auction.  I don't see anything odd or troubling about this auction.

I agree with the post above.
Although the bidder  K...0 (4)  looks a little fishy due to the low feedback, it seems silly for the seller to shill this item.
Plus as stated the bidding action does not look like shilling from my limited experience either.

Additionally, the current price ($114.50)  is well within normal amounts.

The Dragon Archives alone would normally go for about $115-120 (if not more) and the current bid is at less than that with 9 hours left.

The Core Rules 2.0 complete with original box should net about $30 as well when listed alone.

This listing is very attractive and I would be surprised if it finished for less than $125.
In fact; if I did not have both items already I would probably bid this listing to that amount myself.

Nah, that's not shill bidding. This is shill bidding.  (Received a second chance offer a few hours after the auction closed.  Click on the winning bidder's obscured ID to see why I didn't take it. I mean, could he be less obvious about it? )



Speaking of which: what's the easiest way to report somebody to eBay for potential shilling?

g026r wrote:Speaking of which: what's the easiest way to report somebody to eBay for potential shilling?

report link http://pages.ebay.ca/help/policies/sell ... dding.html http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/sel ... dding.html

g026r wrote:Nah, that's not shill bidding. This is shill bidding.  (Received a second chance offer a few hours after the auction closed.  Click on the winning bidder's obscured ID to see why I didn't take it. I mean, could he be less obvious about it? )

Speaking of which: what's the easiest way to report somebody to eBay for potential shilling?

I'd actually think about buying it, then puttting a bullet hole in that idiots perfect feedback with a neg...hammer the DSRs while you're at it.



Mike B.

you know, you guys got me thinking because I won this auction last week, and when I saw the bidding history, it seemed weird to me..same guy bid 29 times......



http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0385873637



what do you guys think ?

carrejo wrote:you know, you guys got me thinking because I won this auction last week, and when I saw the bidding history, it seemed weird to me..same guy bid 29 times......


** expired/removed eBay auction **


what do you guys think ?

driving the price, way to much time on his/her hands, or hasn't figured out the max bid thingie.

Kaskoid wrote:But tell me this, please.
How do you know that it wasn't two bidders with maximums set? They are minutes apart; would you see anyone that was automatically outbid, or just the higher bid that kept the lead? The times one those bids are really screwed up.

I thought the bidding thingie didn't show auto bids?  The winning bid was set on March 7th (same as the starting bid).  If someone were making individual bids to drive the price up, each of their bids would show.

Bid 1 = a***l  @.06 on 3/7
Bid 2 = e***e @.16 on 3/10
Bid 3-31 = r***s @ .26 to 20.02 from 3/11 until 3/14
Bid 32 = e***7 @ 22.00 on 3/24
Bid 33 = n***s @ 22.50 on 3/7

The way it looks to me (and I could be reading it wrong) goes like this:
AL bids
NS outbids AL
EEoutbids NS
outbid by NS autobid
RS
outbid by NS autobid
(rinse/repeat until we pass 22.02)
E7 outbids NS
outbid by NS autobid to total at 22.50 (max bid placed on 3/7/2009).

EE could just have extremely persistant over the course of a few days.

Grug Greyskin wrote:You are close Soul, but have the first two bids out of order.

Here is how that auction went down:

NS Bids $22.50 (or higher).  Price shows as $.01
AL Bids $.06, but is immediately outbid.  He gives up, NS leads at $.11
EE Bids $.16, but is immediately outbid.  He gives up, NS leads at $.21
(They were obviously afraid of ending up on the silliest auction price thread for paying a lousy quarter for an H2)

This is where RS shows up.  He places 29 bids total.  Each bid is the minimum bid, and is immediately automatically outbid by NS.  From 8:02 to 8:05, he bids it up incrementally to $5.01 (for NS still).  Then from 9:39 to 9:41 3 more minimum bids moves it to $10.52.  Then 3 more two days later up to $13.52, then finally 6 more on the 14th to put the price up to $20.52, still with NS in the lead.  Finally, he gives up.

E7 bids $22 late in the going, but is automatically outbid by the winner (first and highest bidder) NS for $22.50.

RS's bids are the suspicious ones.  Could be shilling, trying to up the price little by little.  However, as noted be bclarkie above, there is not necessarily clear evidence of that - the guy has bid on other sellers, and with a similar idiotic methodology.  As Mr. Kask noted, especially the early bids are very close together - maybe an autobid program was making them for him?  I have not used one of those, but I always thought they were used to make a snipe bid at the end, being handy for inconvenient ending times, etc.  Anybody know how those programs work?

yeah thats how it went...I am NS  I had seen it early on and put a top bid of 24.00...just cause I wanted the item and figured give it the top price I wanted to pay for the item at the beginning....