I just was the winning bidder on an e-bay item. I am a little suspicious, because I ended up winning it for my exact maximum bid. There were 6 bids in the final minutes, that drove it up to my exact maximum - the next highest was one dollar shy.
Besides that cooincidence, the other suspicious thing is that all the bidders are “private”, so you can’t tell who they are. It seems like it would be easy for the seller to bid on his own item up to the point where he wins, and then retract his last bid. That would ensure that he gets my maximum.
Does that happen? Or am I being too suspicious?
As far as I know, you can’t have a “private bid”, either the whole auction is private or it’s not. You were bidding in a private auction hence everyone but you was shown as “private” and everyone else would have seen you as “private” as well.
Read up on eBay abuse. It’s quite possible you’ve been the victim of bid-shilling.
It happened to me, I’m pretty sure, on a high-ticket item, though the scammer (if any) miscalculated a bit (what happened was that some mysterious, low-bid bidder started a bidding war with me in the last minutes of the auction – as it turned out, he got the highest bid because I didn’t like the smell of it and dropped out).
Come to find out the seller contacts me the next day and tells me the “lousy SOB winner” is backing out of the transaction, am I interested in purchasing for my last, second-highest bid? Um, okay, maybe – but as I’m considering it for a few days, I notice a funny thing – he and the “lousy SOB winner” have both given each other A++++++ positive feedback! Hmmm. WTF? Sounds like he’s carelessly trying to build up the feedback of a shill identity to gain it further credibility in the future. I called and asked WTF he had given A+++ feedback to a guy who supposedly “backed out” of a high-dollar purchase, and there was some cock-and-bull about how he felt sorry, the guy’s parakeet had died or whatever, but I’m pretty sure it was an out-and-out shiller.
Moral: Caveat (as always) emptor.
In cases like Huerta’s, I’ll usually make a counter-offer. If that bidder had to duck out, I’ll be only too happy to buy the item… at the price it would have gone for if that bidder had never bid at all. If I have the high bid at $40 and he jumps it to 60, then chickens out, I’ll pay $40 for it, just like if he’d never bid. It lets him sell the item and protects me from the shill.
Exactly what I did – I bought it, after much hesitation (Hell, I’m thinking, what ELSE is he being shady about, and this was an item where there could be some serious problems if he weren’t up-front (though I did independent diligence)). But, ultimately, my last bid was a fair one and a price I was still willing to pay (actually, less than the item was worth on the open market), so I just held my nose and took the plunge. Now, if the proposal had been “Wanna buy it for the price the ‘lousy SOB’ backed out on?” then the answer would have been, Hell no, just on principle.
I always bid in off numbers. So if the current bid is 5.00 and the increments is 50 cents, I will bid 6.51. Once I had a bid be that exact amount and I was more than suspicious. How could it be 6.51 if the increments are in 50 cents? I never did business with that person again.