Worst Shill Bidding Ever ?

While browsing ebay tonight I ran across this seller. This auction ends around 1am CST if anyone can catch it.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/United-Stat...911.c0.m1538

The seller is selling a bunch of the 1¢ Tiffany lamp US stamps as singles and has about 30 consecutive auctions, all have 2 bidders, and it's the same 2 on every auction. Go to see other items, choose stamps and get a good laugh at the bidders on every piece.

The second bidder in most of the auctions was cellphoneforever in Hong Kong bidding on his pal's auctions in Brooklyn. Amazing how this stuff goes on.

And all they are doing here is trying to increase traffic coming through their site to sell more cel phones or wallets

They do not want traffic from outside the USA as the shipping is $20.00 international for a stamp and free within the USA.

Someone is teaching this technique to people out there and they think it works so they use it.

Maybe they are using it to increase their numbers of sales so they will fit in the ebay criteria for a higher seller discount depending on numbers of sales? Not sure how that works myself. I don't sell enough to worry about it.

A puzzle like this is interesting to track back through the different user names and countries and products and see what each one is bidding on for each other. Or perhaps they have a computer program running that does it for them and just share the program around?

I feel sorry for them in a way because they are getting caught in using a program or technique that does not spread a good word about themselves but one which is deceitful and untruthful, therefore untrustworthy. Whatever they are trying to achieve with this.

Must be a better way?

They will find the eventual cost to attempt their "cost savings" will bite them in the butt. This scheme is the same as going to the casino and believing the odds are in your favor.

Man that just makes my blood boil! Dishonesty is the bane of my existence! Karma will most surely catch up with him!

Puzzler I don't get how you know the i.d. of the bidder. I just get his code.
But what does get me is there are 7 pages of the same 1c stamp, and all have the same image with the line through the denomination. It's not even a picture of the real stamp!!

Well hopefully ebay will catch up to them, first. This kind of behavior is against ebay policy and needs to be reported by as many people as possible. I certainly have ...

I see that now a bunch of new auctions have started and have 6 days remaining as of this posting and most have 1 bid on them to get things rolling, and they're from the same bidder....again.

I looked at the original lister's completed listings, the ones for $0.11 and then at the bidders for those auctions.

		
	Member Id: o***1 ( 8 ) 	   US $0.11
	
	Member Id: e***o ( 65311)  US $0.06
	
	Member Id: s***a ( 1527)   US $0.03
	
	Starting Price	           US $0.01

The same e***p was in a few bidder lists. Then, looking at the original lister's feedback I saw one with 65,311 feedback and a name that had the letters e and o in it somewhere (letters can be reversed also) and voila,

Mr cellphoneforever buying a tiffany stamp one or two times (how many does one need?), and of course he gave great feedback.

This great feedback is, on second thought, meant to cover up some of the bad feedback he gets.


Then I clicked on this guy's name (e***o) in the above bidders list and saw that he spends 60% of his time the last month bidding on his friends auctions (and most likely visa versa also).

It is harder now to pinpoint someone and their name with the Member ID's encrypted like they are but these guys Did want to leave feedback so it was easier.

It is good to be transparent like this I think. Shows up what you can be doing.

Look at his (e***o)'s
30-Day Summary
Total bids: 2053
Items bid on: 1973
Bid activity (%) with this seller: 61%

and this guy sells cel phones too so he must be a busy little beaver, don't you think, to have time to bid on 0.01 stamps over and over?

I noticed one winner of one auction gave negative feedback because he didn't even receive his stamp. So, possibly they don't even have any to start with, since they are using a picture taken from the USPS web site it looks like, or a USPS publication (with the denomination on the stamp crossed out).

Something else to look for when cruising through someone's feedback, hard to spot, is the tone used. The original lister of the stamp (the wallet seller) when responding to neutral or negative feedback hardly ever acknowledges the fault is his for selling an item not up to snuff, it is mostly always blamed on the buyer for not emailing and talking to them (to allow you to talk to them and let them convince you the wallets are real leather). Although no mention is made of what would or could happen whenever you decided to do that and not just move on to more promising pastures.

Sometimes you just gotta fold 'em folks. The cards ain't no good. You lost your money. Time to move on.

I could be wrong here, as they do have positive feedback, but this is perhaps also people who don't like to rattle the bushes and see what comes out (most of us). But, maybe they realised that for the price they paid they got what they paid for? Some feedback seems to indicate that.

I don't want to put down or disrespect any honest sellers out there, and there are lots of them. You can get a deal on ebay but I think it's more realistic to think that you can get what you pay for on ebay, good and bad and in between.

So the major dishonest thing these guys are doing is trying to cover up bad feedback with good but false feedback that is very hard to prove is false. Selling bad goods and not getting their shipping done is a bad thing to be doing if they want to continue and be Bill Gates or something.

When I first saw this trick (selling Canada stamps) I thought is was just advertising to get people to look and then to click through to their other listings. But now I see it is all probably a cover up for selling less-than-good goods.

Read feedback, it's easier than ever to read the bad news as well as the good now. Click on the bad numbers in the summary box. Look for that tone thing I mentioned. Do they sound sorry or not? Are they going to fix their customer's problems or not? What are they up to, if anything?

No reason to not be helpful and courteous and businesslike at all times. Especially when the chips are down.

Remember that when you buy a nice item, sometimes you end up disappointed also. That's life.

I'm sure if you dig deep enough you will find that all his bids go to his buddy / Partner. Obviously they both have multiple accounts to attempt to hide the blatantly obvious Shill bidding.
it's dealers like this that are the scum of ebay.

I dont get the game !! Is that they would not let me win for a penny or two with free shipping ? (phil the innocent)

To me, and I have only delved into the feedback and user names a level or two deep, it looks like a ploy to increase their positive feedback score and at the same time to drown out the noise of their bad feedback score.

If, when you look at their feedback left for them by others it looks mostly OK because they have so many saying Great Seller etc etc and the feedback numbers, with more positives than neutrals or negatives, seem better than they really are or would be if no 1c items were sold.

It's a loss leader in a way. They pay with their time, possibly a few stamps here and there when some real person wins a stamp auction by mistake or oversight, so their feedback (or name, or honour, or face, depending on where you are from) remains untarnished, or at least not so tarnished as it would have been before.

All perfectly under the radar of most people. They are not defrauding people of vast sums of money or selling cheap stamps as rare ones or anything gut renching. They are seemingly giving away the cheapest stamps available for almost nothing (free shipping) so it seems like and feels like some loss leader advertising, as I mentioned before, but really it is a subtle feedback modifier they can use to threir own benefit.

No policies breached or rules broken. A loophole most of us would not have thought of, me included. What can ebay do with them and for which reason? They are selling something for less than it is worth? The buyers did not want to pay for tracking on their shipping of a one cent stamp? How do you tell, without involving some heavy duty and expensive investigating presence, that they never received or even mailed out their one cent stamps?

I know, it's the principle of the thing, but beyond the shill bidding that it seems as if they must be doing, and this probably would prove very hard to prove, they just need to have all their family or friends or such have ebay accounts or something, their dogs for heaven's sake, (is that possible?) there is nothing criminal to prove here, or am I missing something?

They are not selling something to make money from unsuspecting buyers or probably even to defraud ebay of seller fees paid. They seem to try very hard to always win the one cent stamp auctions themselves.

One could do research on all these interlinked names and warn people somehow that the feedback of these sellers is not trustworthy perhaps.

Perhaps ebay would be interested in their circumventing of the proper feedback procedure but maybe not as no fees have been lost by ebay, no selling rules broken, no buyers harmed, no reports of unscrupulous behavior received. Until now that is. And unless they are trying to increase their feedback to be within a certain level of feedback scoring that will give them a fee reduction benefit from ebay. Not sure on that. Have to read up on the rules.

And you know, what bugs me the most? It is the fact that I couldn't see this until someone else started wondering about it. I needed that level of remove from the situation to see what was going on (if I do actually see it now and there is not further devious levels of hidden desires beneath this one!)

Could be a way to send (via Brooklyn to Hong Kong and back) the secrets to the Canadian hidden bunker of Maple Syrup treasured by the world. I just know it.

Lol Puzzler, Maple Syrup.... Anyways, I doubt he is harvesting feedback as he has 15,000 already.The free shipping thing is for US only. This really is an odd one.