Barrett was caught and prosecuted by North Yorkshire Trading Standards, who found evidence of shill bidding while investigating him for a different offence. "It started from a complaint we had on a minibus he sold that said on the mileage it had only travelled 55,000 miles when actually it had gone 132,000," a spokeswoman from the authority said.
Unfortunately, they only caught him because they were investigating a much larger fraud...which probably didn't give him a lot of credibility when the shilling aspect came up.
