Ebay sellers with possible shill bids

We had a recent case of this in the ebay thread so thought perhaps we could spin this out so people can post cases of sellers who may have employed shill bids to drive up the costs so we can be mindful when seeing these sellers.

Been watching a seller called "adelaiderobot" who had some interesting items up for sale recently. There was a KFC citizen stack, unique toys warlord and kids logic optimus. All these were won by a bidder called e***1. Now this person has 0 feedback and looking at adelaiderobot's feedback, this e***1 has been bidding on auctions since mid February this year (can't see feedback beyond this). Now the final prices of those auctions were not over the top but you can see quite a large jump in bid when e***1 is involved. Not 100% certain that this is a shill bidder but if you consider that this person with 0 feedback is able to drop over $500 + postage on 3 transformers within a day or so, they would have won an auction or two since early this year...

I noticed the same thing, I was watching him, I even threw a bid on.
Seems a little bit suspect in my books though. I've noticed a lot of auctions like this lately.

you mean Shield bidding. This can be proved by ip addresses and involving Ebay in the investigation.

There are also a number of buyers and sellers that do this. I remembered selling an item and some joker just bidded very high and did not communicate later. It pisses me off as I found out the winner did not even touched the account for 1 year so yes, there are sellers who use this method to crush other seller's items so that their becomes the next best.

I suggest you report to Ebay if you feel that there is an unusual pattern.

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Originally Posted by drifand

you mean Shield bidding. This can be proved by ip addresses and involving Ebay in the investigation.

There are also a number of buyers and sellers that do this. I remembered selling an item and some joker just bidded very high and did not communicate later. It pisses me off as I found out the winner did not even touched the account for 1 year so yes, there are sellers who use this method to crush other seller's items so that their becomes the next best.

I suggest you report to Ebay if you feel that there is an unusual pattern.

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Actually no, OP is talking about Shill Bidding, in which the seller uses fake (or friends) accounts to push the price of an item higher. Different to Shield bidding which is done by the buyer, who uses fake accounts to push the price of an item higher, then withdraws the bid at the last moment so that their 'real' account wins the item on the cheap.

Both are scams, both suck.

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Originally Posted by Trent

Actually no, OP is talking about Shill Bidding, in which the seller uses fake (or friends) accounts to push the price of an item higher. Different to Shield bidding which is done by the buyer, who uses fake accounts to push the price of an item higher, then withdraws the bid at the last moment so that their 'real' account wins the item on the cheap.

Both are scams, both suck.

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gotcha, I thought they were the same terms. Now I learned it is different for seller.

Is not easy to prove friends accounts but it can be obvious.

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Originally Posted by drifand

gotcha, I thought they were the same terms. Now I learned it is different for seller.

Is not easy to prove friends accounts but it can be obvious.

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i knew of shill bidding but had never heard of sheild bidding. Thanks for the info!

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Originally Posted by drifand

Is not easy to prove friends accounts but it can be obvious.

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If they keep bidding, then yes, it'll be obvious
Sometimes all they need is one associate & one bid

Would you call this a shill bidder ->
http://offer.ebay.ie/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...84.m1435.l2777

I think so.

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Originally Posted by Deonasis

Would you call this a shill bidder ->
http://offer.ebay.ie/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...84.m1435.l2777

I think so.

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Not even subtle, are they. I reported them.

Would think that they would put in a few 0.99 bids on items that they would lose to spread the bid history rather than go all in on this. Great poster though!

I got the second chance offer from them of course at my highest bid. I asked to reduce the price to my winning bid over the 3rd bidder ($61.50EUR + shipping) but of course they declined that. The difference in price is only about $11AUD but on principle I reported another auction of theirs and refused their offer.

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Originally Posted by Sky Shadow

Not even subtle, are they. I reported them.

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Does the seller find out who or what auctions they get dobbed in on? If they do, considering I refused their second chance offer I guess they will assume it was me.

Not necessarily... and even if they did know it was you, and they block you from their auctions in future, would you really want to do business with them again if they shill bid AND block you because you don't fall for the scam.
You could send that link to the seller, showing that the other person is a shill bidder by only ever bidding on his items, and ask him if he still wants to decline your counter-offer.

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Originally Posted by Sky Shadow

Not even subtle, are they. I reported them.

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I thought I might try to scare him by sending a message with links to the last few of his auctions and say he's been busted profiting from shill-bidding... but figured that if they are doing it intentionally (because the shill-bidder isn't a new/zero bidder), they wouldn't care enough to be bothered. So I looked up the last few of their completed auctions, and just reported all of them for shill-bidding instead. (at least different people reporting it, and not just a bidder, might make it look more significant)
It's ebay's problem now.

It's just a shame you can't include a comment, to at least let them know where to start looking.


Looking at their "completed listings", they have tried unsuccessfully to sell some of the prints as BINs, for around US$200-300 each. Now that they tried auctioning them off to see what the true demand/value is, they obviously weren't happy about it.
The thing I don't understand though, is that they had reserves on them, so I don't see why they'd even need to resort to shill-bidding.

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Originally Posted by griffin

The thing I don't understand though, is that they had reserves on them, so I don't see why they'd even need to resort to shill-bidding.

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I guess they really want to move this poster on. First a high BIN, then a auction with a reserve, and finally an auction with reserve and a shill bidder to see how close to the reserve they could get. :rolleyes: