Ebay Shill Bidding Vender?

This vender consistently lists, and appears to have someone else bid up, US mint stamps at 10 times what they are really worth (see link examples*). The person who is bidding them up has over 90 bid retractions. I've reported this to ebay several times yet nothing ever seems to happen.

If this vender is actually selling this stuff at these prices someone needs to get them to write a book or Linn's article on how the rest of us can sell common US stamps at ten times face value.

Has anyone here actual bought anything from this vender? Has anyone else reported this vender to ebay? Anyone have any ideas on how to get a better response from ebay on these kinds of bid shilling activities? Would it help if we all reported them or does the 'Top Rating' mean that ebay doesn't care?
don


http://www.ebay.com/itm/181276203120/

http://www.ebay.com/itm/171189585744/

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MINT-NH-Lar...047675.l2557

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LARGE-Old-L...181262614756

Yep, pretty obvious. But like others on this forum have stated, ebay doesn't really care. The higher the bidding goes ... the more money ebay potentially makes. I just recommend bidding what you are willing to pay, and no more.

Report it to ebay. Whether they do anything or not it is still a good idea to report it.

In a case like this, if you did put in a sensible bid and the shill bidding (shilling?) went higher, would they offer you a 'second chance' to buy at your lowish bid. Just to get out of jail, so to speak.

Terry

The problem is the second chance offer you get is at your max bid, which went to max only because of the shill bidder. I think this actually happened to my lastnight for the first time. I bid on several items from the same seller and 4 of the 5 items shot up at the last second and I was overbid. A few minutes later I received second chance offers on 3 of the 4 items.

Doubtful, their bidding percentage with that seller is only 4%.

I didn't see any quantity amount in the lots at all so I have no way of knowing if it was a good value or not. I do think the large amounts of bids seem fishy to me. The way he photographed the stacks was certainly to his advantage.
Tom

i am pretty sure that he is actually only selling 50 or so plate blocks, the stack is misleading. You can see the actual ones he is selling in his images in the lower part of the ad. He even got some feedback from a person saying he was mislead by the stack that he shows.
don

I had this happen to me several times (with different sellers), and never took them up on the offer. They always said that they just happened to have extra copies that were not shown in the original sale. Very fishy ...

Well here;'s why I agreed... because I ended up winning an item that was worth very little (the cost of shipping was higher than the item itself) in thinking that I would win multiple items and save on the shipping costs. So seeing as I won that, I might as well make it worth my while to take the other items even though I could have got them for less but paid more for shipping. So it was just a few dollars, not a big deal, but still had me raising an eyebrow.

I did communicate with the seller for a couple of things and he was friendly and communicated quickly, so overall I'm OK and really the shilling thing is just a suspicion as it all has the earmarks of a typical shill bidding scheme.

His photos are very misleading and should be taken to task for that. I had no idea it was so few.
Tom

The first link shows mostly 4c plate blocks and a few 5c, total face value under $13.00, the kind of stuff that can be found as discount postage - yet when I looked earlier it was at $100.00 with a day remaining on the auction (and it's still at $100.00 now). So, yeah, like you said, 10 times actual value.

The supposed shill was bidding in increments until his bid was a penny short of winning, AND THEN STOPPED. It will be interesting to see how the auction ends, but that looks exactly like shill bidding, and helps explain why the shill would be retracting bids. Of course he is trying hard not to win.

It also looks like the seller knows he has hooked a whale.

I'm just saying...

-Dunc

Call him Ishmael

Terry

I see this happen with stacks of US plate blocks much more than any other stamp auctions. Now that I'm looking for it, I usually see that at least one of the bidders has an unusually high number of bid retractions.

It seems to me now that ebay rules are very flexible except when it comes down to dollars and cents.

EDIT: Yes, only 4% bid activity with this seller, but with 12,153 total bids, that's 486 bids.

How can you see if a specific bidder has retracted bids? The bidding only shows the first and last letters of someone's ID. This looks like very suspicious activity.

Right but if you notice he bids over 20 times on every auction to try and scare off other bidders. This is a very common practice on ebay. There's no way this is a shill bidder in my opinion.