"Fake Bidders on Ebay?" Topic

As a purchaser, is there any way to prove the seller isn't using a fake bidder to raise the price.

Today I was bidding on an auction and a mysterious 0 feeback bidder kept out bidding on the auction, I believe to encourage me to raise my bid. Several times, I did raise my bid just a buck or two. They'd quickly outbid me, and low and behold at the last minute they retract their bid.

Does this happen alot and do you as a buyer have to just suck it up?

I'd ask eBay to look into that one, that's pretty odd. I can't say I've ever experienced anything I could say for sure was fake bidding.

It also wasn't like he accidently typed in a wrong amount, which could happen (ie. you meant $10 USD and bid $100). He kept making small raises, probably fishing for my maximum bid.

I guess the one way to stop that from happening is to stop bidding on an item right away and retract your bid if you notice that happening.

Pictors,

I'm starting to think about it from the sellers side. It's a pretty good scam.

I emailed eBay to see if there's any rules against it. Every bid is legal according to them and you are allowed to retract whenever you want.

I can't see any reason other than moral, to not use this little trick when selling stuff that you don't believe your getting enough for your product.

I've had similar instances when 0 feedback buyers "accidently" take the lead and the auction suddenly disappears, right before it ends. And I've had low feedback people win the auction, only to receive second chance emails.

I believe the last second ditch, is a much better scam. If I was an unscruplous seller I would do that, it's unstoppable!

There is no way of knowing. Tell you why;I bid in small increments all the time. I bid $2.00 USD and if I am not ahead I bid another $2 USD and so on up to my limit. I may come back later or the next day and do the same.

I unintentionally always help people out. If I know something is worth $60 USD and they start it at $9.95 USD I may bid $20 USD whether I want it or not. Is this evil? Am I a shill bidder? No cause I like the item and want it but no worries if I don't get it. Just don't want it to go to cheap cause then people won't buy my stuff if I am selling the same thing. Lol.. I am not in collusion with anyone. No, cause I would buy it if I get at that price whether I know the guy or not or I had intended to get it.

Listen, Ebay is a gamble. Figure out if you want it and how much you want to spend and that is it. Don't worry if someone bids you up; that is what it is all about. I get mad , too but what can we do.

That kind of activity just screams shilling to me. You can try reporting it.

What I find works best for me is to 1.) decide how high I am willing to go (based on research of the item and it's price/value) and 2.) bid during the final seconds of the auction so there is no ing about with the nickle and dime bidding wars or shilling.

This sort of thing is called shill biding and is against eBay rules: auction

When I go a ebaying, which is only around X-mas and my daughter's B-day. I find what I am after, put down my max bid minus about whatever the shipping cost is. If I get outbid I will go back and up it to what i originally felt was my max and leave it at that. If I win I win, if not then not.

But that does sound rather fishy there… I would look into reporting it.

Mikefoster and Jana Wang,

Thanks for shill lingo, I know how to report this now.

I would post the auction, but I don't know if I should until after eBay investigates or blows me off. It is pretty obvious, if you could see.

You can report all you want but very hard to prove. Only way is if the guy is a novice and uses his sister's(same last name) account or something like that. No other way to prove it. Don't get all excited just move on and bid on another item.

I hardly ever browse, track or bid on actual auctions nowadays. If I do it is usually on the last day or few hours of the auction.

More often than not, I screen through the "Buy It Now" options for what I am looking for.

Watch I will pick an auction at random and do it. No, way to prove if I know the guy or not. Watch I will bid in small increments of $2.00 USD til I am ahead. I will give the link. My little experiment.

Here is where I bid three times a $1 USD each time.

auction

Am I a shill bidder? Nope. I hope not. Someone could say I am but who can prove it? You don't really know. It could be my gaming buddy, right? Who cares, really?

I know the itme is underpriced and if I win it it is OK. No worries.

I gave up on trying to get anything off ebay once those bidding programs that sneak in an outbid you in the last seconds of the auction became popular. Out of the last thirty items I bid on, none of them had another bidder until the the last ten seconds and they beat me out by less than a dollar.

Once that started happening, ebay stopped being a cool way to find neat stuff and became the world' least reliable and most frustrating way to buy things.

Now if it doesn't have the Buy It Now option I don't bother.

I've always thought it was funny that I won so many auctions at almost precisely what my total highest bid was… when I had put it in early and walked away.

I don't see it as 'immoral' or anything… but it will tend to keep me from bidding on that seller's auctions from then on.
I've done the same as Combatpainter though, bid up the price on things I don't necessarily want, just cause I know that the normal going rate is much higher.

Now if it doesn't have the Buy It Now option I don't bother.

Huh! 60-70% of the wargames stuff in the UK is Buy it Now. I filter it out because most of it is GW stuff at near-retail.
Unexplained bid retractions weren't permitted, but I must admit I haven't looked at the small print recently.

I am a sniper. I never bid on an item until the last 30 seconds of the auction.

I tend to "watch" auctions and bid towards the end if the item is still within my price range. I only use ebay to try and bag a bargain so don't actually end up bidding very often and when I do I'm mostly out-bid. I should think I only win about one in twenty of the auctions I actually bid on, and they're a small percentage of those watched.

When I do bid, I bid my (small) maximum. If I'm outbid, I just move on. There'll always be another one along at some point.

Sounds like a shill to me. I despise this sort of thing, and yet another reason I've stayed away from eBay in recent years. Report it. Then look for a Buy It Now, or better yet, go to The Warstore.

Whats wrong with putting my max bid down? If the most I want to pay for something is like $20 USD then that is what I enter. Let it run see if anyone beats it, if not it's mine. If someone does then I don't feel bad because it was more than I was will to pay out.

It isn't the repeat bidding that's a problem, it's the retracting. Seems like a case of shill bidding-- against the rules, very clearly against them.

However, since this is a "first place winner, second place's bid is the price" auction, this didn't actually affect the price you paid, did it? The way shills drive up the price is to try to just barely be second place. They want to lose but drive the price up. They do that by going a dollar or so ahead of the max bidder. The way to catch this is to look at the seller's other auctions for similar behavior. Especially if it's the same bidder each time (you see the first and last character of their ID).

BTW, most of the academic papers on eBay-style auctions say that the optimum behavior from a buyer's point of view is to snipe in the last minute or so. You'll always bid your reserve price no matter what, but bidding early reveals information to other potential buyers. There's also limited evidence that it can feed "auction fever" driving up the price further. Sniping eliminates this problem.

It used to be a much easier thing to spot before eBay stopped showing the userid of bidders to everyone. That way you could see if a seller was working with a shill bidder or using his or her own second account. Now that they don't show the userid to anyone but the seller (How convienent for a seller doing it!) it is harder to have someone report the problem as it isn't as easy to detect.

Whats wrong with putting my max bid down?

Because if someone else is bidding you end up paying more when you could get it for less.

Example, item starts at $1. USD You are willing to pay $20. USD You enter $20 USD on the bid. Item shows at $1 USD being bid for it. Bidder #2 puts in a $2 USD bid. It's not enough to outbid you so he enters $3, then $4 USD , and so on until he hits his $5 USD limit. You are now paying $6 USD for the item.

The other method: Item starts at $1. USD You flag the auction and watch. Bidder #2 enters a $1 USD bid. One minute before the end of the auction you enter a $20 USD bid. You win it for $2. USD

Simply put, if you bid early all you get is a bidding war that drives the price up.

What about when you have the same buyer always bidding on a sellers items. I have a couple of sellers that sell what I like to buy and I always bid on there items. Do I always win? No. Again that is not reason to say shill. Like I said, only if seller is dumb enough to use an account with same address or same last name can he be caught. Otherwise, no other way to prove it, sorry.

"Example, item starts at $1. USD USD You are willing to pay $20. USD USD You enter $20 USD USD on the bid. Item shows at $1 USD USD being bid for it. Bidder #2 puts in a $2 USD USD bid. It's not enough to outbid you so he enters $3, then $4 USD USD , and so on until he hits his $5 USD USD limit. You are now paying $6 USD USD for the item. "

Cool I was willing to go $20. USD

Its called shill bidding and it happens all the time on ebay. Fake accounts, mates, automated scripts and sites, all at it.

The whole sniping thing seems to result from some mook at Ebay not understanding how auctions are supposed to work (business success is often determined by getting into an arena first, not by being good at it). Timed auctions are supposed to be blind bids (you don't know what other buyers are offering), and auctions with known bids are supposed to extend for a set time period with each bid. It's an effective sales model that's worked for several hundred years. They're actually shooting their commissions in the foot by using the easily exploitable hybrid model.

Stopped bidding years ago. Got tired of the sniping software and fake bids. Got burnt once with missing parts on a miniature (the picture did not show that side) that EBAY would not do anything about.

Dan

I agree with Dan Cyr, I just left the game years ago when I got burned and eBay did nothing, in spite of the fact that this guy was ripping people off left and right. I lost $30 USD some folks lost $300 USD to him. Paypal was precious little help also. The crooks on eBay prey on the fact that you really want the merchandise and are willing to cut someone a little slack as long as they are talking to you.

Ebay isn't perfect just like everything else on this planet. If you know how to use it it saves you money if you don't it doesn't work so avoid it. Everyone gets burned somewhere so don't feel so bad if everything on Ebay didn't go perfect every time.

Part of the problem is that eBay telegraphs your high bid in some cases. For instance:

You bid $5.00 USD on something that already has a bid of $4.50 USD on it . . .

Case 1: It goes to $5.50 USD as the original bidder's high bid is $5.50 USD or more and eBay will auto-bid on their behalf.

Case 2: It goes to $5.17. You now know that $5.67 USD and the thing is yours or if you're a shill, to stop.

I've left out some other cases, but Case 2 has been true since the beginning of eBay and should have been fixed long ago.

Wellspring,

I got to meet some of the participants in an eBay paper done at Stanford. They were who told me about Sniping, as bidding early, as you have rightly said, reveals info to others about the potential market value of an item to other bidders.

Terrement (and others), I have used sniping software before too, but found that it is too easy to do it in person (and I lost my software in a HDD crash that wasn't backed up). If I have multiple screens open, each with an incremental bid (one screen bidding $15, another bidding $20, and another bidding $25, etc…) that has been entered, but not yet confirmed, and then another screen that is set to refresh at two second intervals, then I can see if there is going to be a sniping war at the end of the bidding. I can even beat a bid-bot with this system (We've done some competitions at school as part of an AI class).

eBay really should change it's bidding model (and one of the classes' data was done specifically to give (sell by the school) to Google and eBay, as bid-gaming modeling) so that it is not so easy to game their system

Combat Painter,

I not mad at someone outbidding me at all. It's when a seller or friend of a seller creates a brand new 0 feeback account. This new account only bids on this ones sellers auctions and bids until they find out my max bid, only to retract at the last second. This is what I don't like and it's supposed to be against eBays rules.

Not that eBay will do anything about it.

I didn't know about the sniping bots, I've always wondered how people outbid me when there's zero seconds left on the auction and I'm still listed as the high bidder. I might have to get a bot of my own, since they're not against the rules.

I unintentionally always help people out. If I know something is worth $60 USD USD and they start it at $9.95 USD USD I may bid $20 USD USD whether I want it or not. Is this evil? Am I a shill bidder? No cause I like the item and want it but no worries if I don't get it. Just don't want it to go to cheap cause then people won't buy my stuff if I am selling the same thing. Lol.. I am not in collusion with anyone.

I do the same thing. I own a grocery store. When I see a really good sale at the store down the street, I sneek a price gun in and reprice the sale items. I don't like to see them sell stuff too cheaply, and I'm worried about how their low prices will impact my own sales.

I don't have time to snipe, I have a life and work won't let me view eBay anyway. I'm also disgusted by all the "by it now" listings since they are all too frequently at retail price (or higher). eBay has ceased to be a place to dump your junk and find someone else's junk that is your treasure. It's just another store IMHO with few exceptions.

Can't say I've ever felt like there was a shill going on, just outbid by someone who had nothing to do but monitor the listings.

Baconfat, a sniping bot can be constructed in also any web-language… I don't know Java, but I hear that is where they got started out. I found out about them by hanging with some AI People down in Silicon Valley. They abused me for relying upon myself to bid on eBay, and one of them gave me a bot program. You just entered the URL of the auction you wanted, and then listed the price you were willing to pay and the increment of the bids.

Then, it just goes to the URL in question, fishes the price out of the page, and waits till the time < 10seconds (or so), and then begins to do a combination of bidding/DOS attack on the site so that other bidders will have a hard time getting in.

I could care less about those expressing hostility to bidding strategies on eBay (especially coming from people who describe themselves as "Gamers"), as our world is going to increasingly operate on the time clock of bots over people. It's just good old evolution in action.

I've got one that looks similar. Normally when I see four bids but still the starting bid amount, I expect either an eBay Dutch (not the same as an auctionhouse Dutch, from what I'm told) or a reserve price. This one has neither. One guy with enough feedback to know better has four bids in.

I put in a modest bid and look at the results: One of his has been beaten, but the other three are now auto-raised ahead of mine. What he's doing I'm not sure, but it reeks of some form of info fishing.

There are rules on eBay?

Like others I usually wait until the last several minutes of an auction.

Just like the last four auctions that I just won within the last hour.

All 15mm French Napoleonic

13 x Mtd Cdrs, 2 x Foot Cdrs, 24 x Cav, 116 x Inf & 72 x Old Guard. So counting mtd figures as 2 this is around 264 figures with a cost to me of around .44 cents per figure.

I have in the past bidded on items with my max amount and have been out bidded later or never got to be the high bidder.

This did make the other bidder pay more but they wanted it more than me.

The thing that I am more concern about is a seller's number and have passed on things just because the seller only had a rating of 7.

The items noted above were all from the same seller who's rating was 66 which is lower than I would like but I was willing to take the risk.

Cog: If you're interested in this kind of thing, there are dozens of academic papers on the subject. Several researchers have built their career looking at the theoretical and real-world dynamics of eBay. Of course, economists have been studying auctions in general for centuries.

Rubber Suit Theatre: There are actually dozens of structures for auctions, each with its own unique characteristics. Since buyer, seller and auctioneer each have different and somewhat conflicting interests, the style that is best for one party isn't necessarily best for the other two.

link

Seems like there's an awful lot of angst regarding the bidding process. I just put in how much I'm willing to pay, then wait for the email. I know a gun auction website that extends the bidding time 15 minutes past the last bid. It eliminates sniping and ensures the seller gets top dollar.

Wellspring. I have several academic papers on eBay, written by students at Stanford, and I have read dozens of others, and know MANY people down in Silicon Valley (I am just to the north of SV) who do all kinds of game theory stuff in their RL.

Two of them gave me the "Google" Lecture, which included eBay, and how it works, one night (both were employed in writing The Algorithm at one point in their lives). They went through more math than my poor brain could handle (I can handle it now, but I am still VERY clumsy with it) about bidding strategies and game theory on when the opponent knows, and when the opponent doesn't know information about yourself, and how that applied to many things Google and eBay.

Personally, I am studying AI in college as a second degree (technically the degree is Cognitive Computationalism and Computational Engineering), and we just started into things like game probabilities and theory… I am so sick of combinatorics I can't stand it.

Personally, I prefer a different method of conducting the auctions on eBay than they use, but I have no power to change it really (I keep writing them letters about allowing more choice in auction type). It would be nice if one could actually have more info on the opposition bidders than one gets, but due to safety concerns, they have limited this info (and I can't blame them).