Such obvious shilling!

Gleeful

http://offer.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidderProfile&mode=1&item=290737647469&aid=j***k&eu=v4xhqx3Q8FO%2FYbmK%2FTwGRURFHGieD26c&view=NONE&ssPageName=PageBidderProfileViewBids_None_ViewLink

Look at the bid retractions too! :eek:

Gleeful

I just put a 'test' bid on and 6 minutes later, low and behold, I was outbid. Is there anywhere I can report this?

porto_bello

I once got a second chance offer for a painting within 5 minutes of an auction closing, and knew something was up. Just before the auction end, someone had incrementally bid up the price by £5 a time and beaten me at the last attempt.

When I looked at the bidding trails, I found they had bid on over 100 items - all the same seller, across a multitude of categories.

I phoned eBay to report what was clearly going on and was immediately told that eBay software systems are in place to prevent any shill bidding, so it was quite impossible.

I asked the representative to look at the screen with over 100 bids uniquely against the same seller and was told there might be all kinds of reasons, but not shill bidding. However, they agreed to take a note of my concerns and suggested I forget all about it.

I got in touch with Trading Standards providing all the links and trail of evidence, and I got a very different response - particularly when the shill bidding continued even after eBay had been informed and given the same evidence.

So you could tell eBay - but expect to be fobbed off. But if you are prepared to put in the work and track down who the shill bidder ID is and provide all the evidence, I'd recommend contacting Trading Standards if you actually want to flag up the fact it is going on.

From memory, I sent an email and got a phone call back a few days later, asking for all the available evidence to be forwarded to a specidic investigator's mailbox.

plumface

Report shill bidding

This worked for me!

porto_bello

plumface wrote: »

Report shill bidding

This worked for me!

But after you submitted the details, did eBay actually do anything though?

I'm going to hazard a guess that the seller(s) you reported is/are still actively selling.

Haffiana

I think the reason eBay often do nothing about shill bidding is that it is incorrectly reported most of the time.

What I mean, is that for every genuine example reported (as the ones above seem to be, please don't misunderstand me), there are probably a few dozen reports from people who have simply been outbid, or who have received second chance offers or who simply don't understand why they haven't won an auction or even how an auction works.

Even this board has plenty of posts from people who apparently see shilling activity with no evidence at all - I would imagine eBay get thousands of reports from the similarly confused. Buried in those reports are the genuine, accurate reports of shilling of course, but how does eBay wade through them all?

RainbowDrops

I could look like a shiller at the moment, there's a seller who is lisitng the same item daily, and I keep making small incramental bids (it's a low priced item, and I don't want to pay much over the starting price). Heh.

porto_bello

I'm sure there are a good deal of inaccurate reports of shill bidding reported to eBay, but my own experience is that even when faced with a mountain of indisputable evidence, eBay looks the other way.

I think we will all agree that the purpose of shill bidding is for an item to sell for price higher than its natural market price. Since eBay makes a percentage of the selling price, eBay stands to lose money if it aggresively pursued shill bidders.

Put simply, eBay has a financial incentive to ignore shill bidding. In the longer term though, hopefully eBay will be forced to do more to uphold the law than pursue a very occasional court case. My hope, in supplying a blatent example to Trading Standards (with feedback records that went back 3 years) was to help move that day forwards.

over_flo

I reported shill bidding a few weeks ago and nothing appears to have happened to either the seller or the bidding account.

Angie74

She's at it again now from another (new) account because I reported her for the other account. Seriously, does she think people are blind??? They should just close her main account, that would teach her a lesson when she loses all her fb. She's not very nice either, had a few emails from her and she's obnoxious!

RFW

porto_bello wrote: »

I think we will all agree that the purpose of shill bidding is for an item to sell for price higher than its natural market price. Since eBay makes a percentage of the selling price, eBay stands to lose money if it aggresively pursued shill bidders.

Put simply, eBay has a financial incentive to ignore shill bidding. In the longer term though, hopefully eBay will be forced to do more to uphold the law than pursue a very occasional court case. My hope, in supplying a blatent example to Trading Standards (with feedback records that went back 3 years) was to help move that day forwards.

I actually think that if it was rife it would be in Ebay's interests to discourage it. A lot of what they have in place is good enough, there will always be occasions where it's impossible to spot and occasions when the complainant is wrong. I was actually accused of shill bidding recently, after sending a second chance offer for an item we have quite a lot of and finally got a decent price for. We also have a number of regular customers who only buy from a couple of sellers, so it could quite easily look as though there was something wrong there.

The majority of the time the seller ends up buying the item back, only when the price has been pushed up and there is a buyer is there actually a victim.