US Mint And NH Banknotes From Ralph Orton Estate Cat $23,500

Randy... from your lips to The Almighty's ears...

Not mentioned above: The 7 cent Scott 161 was reperforated on the left and the 30 cent 217 has improved perforations or a reperforaed or bottom margin.

Clark

It sold for over $6000.00 and the bid history has been hidden by ebay so we can't tell whether one of the shills or some naif innocent was left holding the bag.

correction, $6900.00, nearly $7000.00

A bidder with 513 bids won it with only one bid. Bid history was there, 5 bids in the last month. Could be a shill, could be a dealer, could be anyone but I doubt it was a naif. Spending $7000 on a hobby about which you know nothing seems pretty unlikely.

Earlier in the day a new bidder with ZERO feedback placed bids of $2500 and $2900 on the lot. Curiously those bids were later retracted. Apparently it had the desired affect and was later cleared to avoid suspicion.

How many new ebay bidders drop down bid like that ?

Tell me, how do you tell it's a shill?

"Tell me, how do you tell it's a shill?"

See yesterday at 2:24 pm

"Tell me, how do you tell it's a shill?"

Actually, that's part of the problem - and I'm guessing you already know the answer, but for the lurkers out there...

Since ebay now hides bidders' identities, it has become much more difficult to identify shill bidding. Used to be, for example, easier to look at feedback and get an idea where bidders were too active, or too exclusive, often to just one seller.

One thing, honest bidders often bid late, not wanting to reveal their bid early and have later bidders pop in and post repeated small-increment bids, pushing up the final sale price.

Shills do the opposite. They bid early, to push up the price, to indicate (falsely) that there is interest in the item, and to give genuine bidders plenty of time to bid and win.

Shills often bid on just one seller's items, or a select few if there are multiple identities in the shill bidding operation. In the past, some of the larger shill bidding operations on ebay were caught by looking at how the identities cross-linked as to where they were bidding.

Shills often have low feedback numbers, they don't have, or want to risk, good established online identities.

Some would place thousands of shill bids but receive very little feedback, in an effort to avoid linking their identity to just one or a few sellers.

When a shill wins an item that has a somewhat unique feature, like a valuable used stamp for example or a collection of stamps, and after the sale, the seller relists what is obviously the same items, that's another clue. One bad seller (coins, not stamps) offered modern stuff which was hard to identify as unique, but slipped up and sold a vintage guitar to one of his shills and right after the auction he relisted it again. Unfortunately ebay did not think that was an indication of shilling, even though it was "bought" by one of his massively loyal bidders supposedly buying hundreds of common proof sets one at a time from the same seller.

Anyway, today it is still possible to look at the feedback posted by suspected bad sellers to spot a pattern among his "buyers", because mot of them do like to pump up their feedback.

When looking at an ebay page of a completed auction, if shilling is suspected, it is still possible to get some clues, if it is not a Private auction. Click the link where it shows the number of bids received. That will open a list of the bids, with the identities concealed in ebay's coded style. Click on the suspected shill ID (even if he didn't win the item) and his recent bid activity will be revealed, especially you can see how often he bids on the same seller's items, and whether he bids early or late, and whether he bids in narrow fields of interest or on all the stuff the seller offers.

These are all just clues, of course, but with bad sellers a pattern often shows up, sometimes blatantly.

No. The answer to my question is simply, "You don't" and in my opinion it is extremely irresponsible of anyone to accuse a seller of shill bidding publicly. Even for ebay it is almost impossible to prove it as IP addresses mean nothing since dynamic addresses outnumber static ones 30 to 1 at least.

I have at least 30 eBayers that only bid on my stuff on ebay, no one elses. These are people from our forum that don't use ebay, but make an exception for us. They are people we've sold to at shows/flea markets that hate ebay, but make an exception for us because they know us.

There are also bidders that bid 30 times in a row because the bid count goes up and makes it look like a bidding war to scare off other bidders. People that jump to conclusions assume these are shill bids and the seller has no control over it.

I'll tell you right now, if you accused us openly on a public forum of shill bidding, you'd be signing for your mail and I would be relentless. You would be messing with my livelihood on 100% assumptions no clue what you're saying.

The evidence can be circumstantial, and really that's all there is, so how else does a potential bidder protect himself? Each buyer looks at the clues, and decides for himself or herself.

Jeez.

Bobby,
There is way, by taking advantage of an ebay bug, to view the bidders names. I am not going to post how it is done because ebay will fix it. I will say that this bug is available only on some of the ebay sites and not others. This goes to show how the various ebay divisions are run differently.

I'll be making another post in a minute that also shows some strong evidence of some "weird" sales patterns. If it doesn't reflect shill bidding and other nonsense than I am all ears on what and why a seller would do this...
Don

Seeing the bidders identities proves nothing.

THANK YOU Bobby. These kinds of accusations WITHOUT proof are walking a thin legal line. The fraudulent sales of stamps while using the mail to perform that fraud is a Federal Crime. Shill bidding at auctions is also a Felony. If someone wants to accuse someone else of a FELONY they BETTER have proof - as in proof that would prevail in a courtroom.

Speaking of shills Bobby - you might want to see if some members here are opening up second accounts with you - maybe to act as "shills" of a sort - to further some agenda of their own. I'm no computer guy, but it seems like you could tell from IP addresses if some people here are doing that.

Also, I echo your sentiment about other situations that might look - to someone who is drinking the Kool Aid with regard to ebay being such a horrible dangerous place - like shill bidding. I have over 10,000 sales on ebay and I run a clean family operation. I have a loyal following who bid on a lot my stuff. And I have a group that I call bottom feeders who only make opening bids - I guess hoping the lot will go undiscovered by others and they will get it cheap. This could easily be interpreted as shill bidding since they are bidding on a large # of my listings, and maybe few of anyone else's.

This campaign to bash ebay hurts ALL ebay sellers, because it may be scaring people away from ebay altogether. Sadly there are people who are gullible who believe people who are irresponsibly hurling accusations that they CANNOT PROVE. If someone here can prove it, then they should DO SO. Otherwise spare us the game of 'Kiss me, catch me' and stop singling ebay users out publicly, and then hiding behind statements like "...it is better for me to not be specific at this time." If you want to go after someone then get specific and LAY OUT THE EVIDENCE FOR ALL TO SEE. People here aren't stupid. If you are right about a crook then list all the EVIDENCE that lead you to the conclusion that someone is a CROOK. We should all come to the same conclusion that you did. That's the way things are done in both the legal and scientific communities. If you have the truth on your side you will be in no jeopardy - the truth is an affirmative defense to libel and slander.

My post had nothing to do with bidders protecting themselves, it had to do with public accusations, so I don't understand your reply at all.