As I was browsing for some art this week, I noticed that the artist I was interested in sold most her stuff to the first and only bidder.
Which got me to think - is it possible for a seller to open a new Ebay account, using a new email and artificially increase the price by bidding on his/her own auction? If he/she were to win because the other bidder stopped bidding, he/she can always pretend that money was exchanged…
Is this a known practice on Ebay? Does it have a name? And how does Ebay prevent this (if they prevent it at all)?
MODS - if this is not the right forum, please move…
It is called “shill bidding”, and is strictly forbidden by eBay policy. If you are caught once, you get a warning, more offenses result in indefinite suspension of your account. And yes, they do catch you.
Yep, ‘shill bidding’ is common enough to be notorious. Often it’s used to push a legitimate bidder to the highest price they’re prepared to pay, rather than simply the minimum necessary to beat the second-highest bid. Ebay dislike it, and publicly say they’re very strict about it, but with something of the size of eBay, it’s hard for them to patrol every listing.
However, this is still a minority problem - I’ve never seen anything that remotely resembled such fraudulent behaviour, except when told where to look (sometimes from this board). In the case you mention, it’s possible that only one person was interested! (Although multiple cases of single-bidder sales starts to look suspicious.)
True…but if he/she has multiple auctions in which he/she artificially drives the price up then the gain from the other auctions do offset any fees paid for auctions on which he/she ends up being the highest bidder.
BTW this practice pre-dates online auctions, in case that wasn’t obvious. Although you hired a stooge to bid since you couldn’t do it yourself. The stooge is the shill.
It’s not just against the rules; it’s also illegal. Here is a case from a couple years back where three people were arrested after shill bidding for expensive collectibles on eBay.
Not when you’ve got computers doing all the tough work for you. Here is a live chat transcript from a 2002 talk with the VP of eBay’s Trust & Safety Department, who notes that an automated system is set up to catch shill bidders:
That’s tought talk from the VP. But that was three years ago, and it’s the first I’ve ever heard of such a system. Plus, shill bidding doesn’t seem to have dwindled.
They don’t seem to brag about it too much - especially recently. A search yields dozens of references to it between 2000 and 2002, however. Maybe it was just a vaporware ploy to scare shillers and placate sellers. Perhaps it was a project that ended up getting scrapped. Then again, maybe they’ve just decided to keep their mouths shut about it for some reason.
A more recent article (3/31/05) on CNET seems to support that last possibility:
Someone I know was letting her b/f use her EBay account to sell some CDs, he got a friend to bump up the price (unwittingly becoming the winning bidder and requiring a resale ) does EBay do anything to prevent this?
The easiest form of shill bidding to spot (from the POV of ebay’s own system) would be when the seller places shill bids to keep elevating the price, until the shill ID wins the auction (by a dollar/pound), then the seller pretends the high bidder backed out and tries to sell to the (genuine)next-highest bidder as a Second Chance Offer.
Easy to spot simply by counting the number of second-chance offers a seller makes in auctions that had the same high bidder.
) does EBay do anything to prevent this?