eBay to hide all User IDs in ALL auctions

peter999

It is only a matter of time before this is challenged in the courts.

Ebay could have taken numerous other steps before making all IDs anonymous.

peter999

RFW

peter999 wrote: »

It is only a matter of time before this is challenged in the courts.

Ebay could have taken numerous other steps before making all IDs anonymous.

peter999

If it is that prevalent, then it shouldn't be hard for you to find and challenge in the courts.

What other steps could Ebay have taken that would have protected users from bogus offers accessed via their user ids on items they had bid for? (as far as I can tell 'masked' ids are equally as anonymous).

To say that Ebay don't do anything about shill bidding is not true, I've reported shill bidders in the past and both ids (seller and bidder) have been suspended, in one case 5 accounts were involved and suspended. Reported cases on here (if you search back) have also been suspended in many cases. It can never be wholly wiped out anyway, it just isn't possible. Anyone who has a friend or relation anywhere in the world can get them to bid as a one off and no one would be any the wiser, no matter how much or little they do about it, there will always be some dishonest user.

PhilipCohen

RFW,

Your comment is fair enough; when shill bidding is reported to eBay they have to (appear to) do something; I have also had a used-goods dealer kicked off but it took some three reports over a couple of months to get there; the shill bidding was blatant and on nearly every listed item, by the same bidder! I have also had the experience of not getting any action with a couple of other cases that were very obvious to me (details in another earlier more general rant at http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=23227&sid=fecaa52a5f84529ab1d304bb9dc95b7a)

Unfortunately, with absolute anonymity we simply can no longer spot even blatant shill bidding. Indeed with the “additional information” now supplied, supposedly to counterbalance this level of anonymity, a genuine bidder can appear to be a shill!

My concern therefore is not so much about the effectively bidder-specific anonymity of “a***b (n)” now in use in the US and elsewhere (and which still allows genuine bidders to watch for suspicious patterns of bidding) but with the absolute anonymity of “Bidder N” in use in Australia and the UK.


I don’t think that eBay is actively analysing IP addresses, not like many discussion forums do (we still have to manually log in to eBay; but then you could genuinely have multiple accounts on one IP). If they were it could/should make it much harder for the professional shill bidder to operate: they would at least have to get additional telephone lines for additional broadband services and even then any analysis of the data would be able to sense the stream of suspicious non-winning bids coming from any such secondary static IP address/es. Then, I suppose they could do their shill bidding via “dial-up” to hide behind the resulting varying dynamic IP address/es.

Indeed, if eBay was actively using the so called sophisticated software that they claim to have to analyse bidding data there should not be any habitual or blatant shill bidding for genuine bidders to notice and report.

My problem is that I have documented their statements on various matters (particularly on shill bidding) and I find many of these statements to be nonsensical and blatantly disingenuous; as a result I simply do not trust them.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that eBay has no real interest is stopping shill bidding; only in making it disappear so that genuine bidders cannot detect it and as a consequence eBay does not have to spend any of their valuable resources appearing to do anything about it.

Undetectable shill bidding has no detrimental effect on eBay’s bottom line; indeed the saving in outgoings from the reduction in customer support staff may improve it, but ultimately only if the additional income received or savings made is not outweighed by the general lessening in buyer support that has clearly come about due to an undoubted lessening of buyer confidence in the auction platform as a result of some recent eBay decisions.

I firmly believe that, notwithstanding any statements by eBay to the contrary, no action taken by the current management team at eBay has anything to do with benefitting eBay users: eBay’s every action is purposed towards improving eBay’s bottom line, and consumers should be aware that if at any time there appears to be some benefit to consumers, that is purely coincidental.

We will have to stop meeting like this; people will begin to talk.

peter999

RFW wrote: »

If it is that prevalent, then it shouldn't be hard for you to find and challenge in the courts.

The issue is NOT just about "shill bidding", its about a free & open auction.

And why can't you see people's feedback scores ??

Why not Bidder1(46), Bidder2(0), Bidder3(5) ??

The anonymity has gone too far !!

peter999

PhilipCohen

And why can't you see people's feedback scores ??
Why not Bidder1(46), Bidder2(0), Bidder3(5) ??

Indeed, if that was the case, as it is for the alias "a***b (N)" in use in the US, bidders could at least be differentiated by that feedback number and genuine bidders would still have some chance of watching for suspicious patterns of bidding.

But, the question still remains: what was the purpose of changing from the effectively bidder-specific "a***b (N)" to the absolutely anonymous "Bidder N" in the first place: there can be no other reason than to deceive the consumer!

Indeed as I have explained in my auctionbytes.com rant, there is no need for any of this anonymity in the first place: the reasons given therefor by eBay are disingenuous.

RFW

peter999 wrote: »

The issue is NOT just about "shill bidding", its about a free & open auction.

And why can't you see people's feedback scores ??

Why not Bidder1(46), Bidder2(0), Bidder3(5) ??

The anonymity has gone too far !!

peter999

Just bid somewhere where that is possible if you don't like it. Sellers can see the feedback score, why would someone bidding against them need to, it doesn't matter. As a seller with predominantly auctions I can't say it has made any difference whatsoever to my buyers/bidders. Apart from the shill bidding aspect I can't see why you would need to know who is bidding against you, there is no such thing as a "free and open auction anywhere". Ebay user names are largely anonymous anyway.

PhilipCohen

RFW,

I think I now understand: you are predominantly a seller, whereas I am predominantly a buyer. I suspect that explains why we have differing views on eBay’s application of absolute anonymity of bidding.

However, just for fun, I will restate the case in as few words as possible:

eBay’s original primary user IDs were always anonymous: no one could ever tell who any another bidder actually was without first having had any dealings with that person; nothing has changed in this respect.

eBay, a while ago, blocked access to other bidders’ direct email addresses, and that was always the simple, and only, solution required to solve the supposed problem of fraudulent “second chance offers”.

If any increased level of anonymity was ever desirable then the effectively bidder-specific alias (ie, “a***b (N)”), currently in use in the US and elsewhere, was all that was necessary to stop bidders from “identifying” other bidders, but still allowed genuine bidders to watch for suspicious patterns of bidding across any particular seller’s other auctions.

The increased level of anonymity provided by the alias currently in use in Australia, the UK, Ireland and the Philippines (Bidder 1, Bidder 2, etc) serves no other purpose than to deceive the consumer in that its anonymity is absolute and it in effect serves to “aid and abet” unscrupulous sellers to defraud buyers and one would hope that such behaviours should be illegal under the terms of the UK Fraud Act 2006.

As a matter of interest, eBay have done so much damage to themselves in Australia that they are currently running self-promotional ads on national free-to-air TV. Apparently eBay management still have no concept of why their business has been dropping off recently!

It’s been nice debating the issue with you.

RFW

PhilipCohen wrote: »

eBay, a while ago, blocked access to other bidders’ direct email addresses, and that was always the simple, and only, solution required to solve the supposed problem of fraudulent “second chance offers”.

Just on this point, email addresses weren't accessed in this way, they were obtained from the user-id itself and not directly through Ebay. I'd rather not write again how this was done for obvious reasons, but I did specify it on a thread titled 'bogus second chance offers' which you could look for on here.

It was not a 'supposed' problem, it was a real and horrendous problem, that was ongoing and getting worse, the only solution I could see was to make the bidder ids anonymous, this being the lesser of the two unfortunate evils.

peter999

RFW wrote: »

Just bid somewhere where that is possible if you don't like it. Sellers can see the feedback score, why would someone bidding against them need to, it doesn't matter. As a seller with predominantly auctions I can't say it has made any difference whatsoever to my buyers/bidders. Apart from the shill bidding aspect I can't see why you would need to know who is bidding against you, there is no such thing as a "free and open auction anywhere". Ebay user names are largely anonymous anyway.

Why ??

Ebay can change the sytem so IDs are not completely anonymised.
This is inevitable, as there is no logic to it.

I've explained why it is useful to check bidders history & see how they bid in live auctions.

peter999

PhilipCohen

RFW,

I promise, if you stop putting up ridiculous arguments I will stop responding to them.

I have covered this direct email address nonsense in my linked rant; the suggestion that there was a serious problem with scammers “guessing” users’ direct email addresses from users’ IDs is, in my humble opinion, a load of disingenuous tosh!

Think about it; the direct email addresses of users are now protected; therefore scammers would now have to collect all those eBay IDs, then using those IDs in combination with various combinations of “@something-or-other” (yahoo.com, aol.com, etc) send out phony emails to all those resulting addresses in the hope that they will ensnare an eBay user who has used his email name as his eBay user ID and has just been an underbidder for the particular item the scammer is using as bait for the fake SCO; and find some one silly enough to respond. In all my long life I have never heard such an unadulterated load utter rubbish!

Maybe scammers could still attempt to target individual underbidders with a SCO for an identical item to that which the underbidder was unsuccessful. Same problem as above with attempting to “guess” the direct email address; same problem hoping to find someone dopey enough to respond without checking further. If this was happening it could only be a very minor problem that should have been addressed by education.

If there was a serious problem with fraudulent SCOs that problem only existed so long as scammers could access an individual underbidders direct email address, which is no longer the case.

Frankly, that eBay thinks that eBay users will swallow such rubbish and that indeed some do swallow such rubbish is simply one more example of the outrageous disingenuous of the current management team at eBay.

Further, as a seller, unless you think that you can get along without buyers, you have to stop taking anything the eBay says at face value; I have already given you plenty of examples of the blatant disingenuous of many of eBay’s statements. Whenever eBay says they are doing something for the benefit of eBay users you have to look for the benefit to eBay and if indeed there is any benefit to eBay users that would be simply coincidental.

As a matter of interest I have only ever received one SCO and that was a “legitimate” SCO that resulted from a shill bidding seller whose shill bidding failed to get me to bid higher.

You have admitted to being a seller; you don’t also work for eBay, do you?