 Ebay shill bidding
Friday, 8 September 2006
In the online auction marketplace, shill bidding is the corrupt practise of bidding on your own items or having friends (or other corrupt associates) bid on your items, purely to artificially inflate the final price and make the legitimate buyers pay more for the item you’re selling.
Shill bidding is probably most widespread on Ebay, the worlds largest online auction site. While Ebay have largely downplayed the fact that shill bidding seemingly still occurs on their network, buyers continue to complain about it’s regularity, despite Ebay’s allegedly sophisticated detection methods.
So how do you spot a shill bid?
Let’s explore a single item. A common piece of software: Windows XP Professional SP2, as auctioned by a seller identified as “jenifer7286″ and eventually sold on August 18 2006. If we look at the bidding history for the item, we’ll notice a handful of things which could be interpreted as peculiar:
- The buyer known as “4dafoe61″ appeared to make two “strategic” bids but failed to win the auction.
- The buyer known as “4dafoe61″ has never won any auction items on Ebay since registering on June 13 2004.
- The buyer known as “4dafoe61″ used to be known as “andreanastars” prior to March 30 2006.
- The buyer known as “4dafoe61″ has bid on eight auction items in total, with seven of those by the same seller, “jenifer7286″ and all for Microsoft software.
Is this an example of shill bidding?
I’m not certain but when you take into account the above facts, it looks a bit dodgy, don’t you think? Especially when you consider that the buyer known as “4dafoe61″ was actually the highest bidder at another auction for a copy of Windows XP Professional SP2 on August 17 2006. What’s strange about that? The seller was “jenifer7286″ once again, for one. There’s also no mutual feedback, which often indicates that the buyer had retracted their winning bid after the auction had ended.
Of course, it could also merely be a striking occurrence of a bunch of events at the one time and apparently by mere chance. Decide for yourself.
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Ebay have recently introduced bidding anonymity, which makes it now harder to spot these fake bids:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6497776#6497776
With many thousands of items sold every day, ebay now protects shill bidders and increases their own revenue by many thousands of dollars every day!
eBay introduces absolute anonymity for (shill) bidders.
In Australia, the UK, Ireland and the Philippines, eBay has obscured auction bidding to the point that genuine bidders have got absolutely no chance of detecting and thereby protecting themselves from "shill" bidding (a criminal offence in most civilized countries) by unethical vendors.
Notwithstanding eBay's statements to the contrary, this application of absolute anonymity (ie, Bidder 1, Bidder 2, etc) by eBay on these sites serves absolutely no purpose other than to deceive consumers by making even any otherwise obvious shill bidding undetectable; and the same criticism has always been applicable to eBay's other shill bidders' facility, "User ID kept private".
Again, notwithstanding eBay's various pronouncements about shill bidding being banned on eBay, eBay is now, on these sites, effectively (and knowingly) "aiding and abetting" such shill bidders at the expense of consumers. [more]
For those with a longer attention span, a lengthy critical analysis of this matter appears at:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6498345#6498345
I apologise in advance for the length of this linked "rant". Needless to say eBay would not tolerate it on their discussion forums and I am currently serving a 30-day sentence on the eBay "naughty chair" for posting links to it.
If you are an unethical shill-bidding seller or a buyer who is not concerned that on the above-mentioned national sites eBay is effectively "aiding and abetting" such shill-bidding sellers to cheat you, read no further.