Cartel Strikes Again... #477 "Mnh" Shilled To $1400....

http://www.ebay.com/itm/12155048770...rms=gh1g%3DI121550487708.N18.S2.M-4666.R3.TR8

I can almost guarantee you that if you do a search of "sold" items for #477 unused, that you will find this exact stamp one or more times. Shill or not, there is no guarantee that this stamp will actually sell to anybody, and it can pop up again in a few weeks being sold by "re-entry", "rush-more", "superdeal70" or any other of the other sellers in the so-called "cartel" group (which is believed to be only one person.....).

One of the so called bidders has a feedback score of 602 with 82% activity with the seller in question....hhhmmm.

Shiller without question, and until proven otherwise.

I can't believe ebay doesn't step in at that point.

Why would they ? They are in business to make money so if the bids get run up it benefits ebay. Welcome to corporate greed.

That and it would mean ebay actually assigning a person to handle such things instead of using an automated system. ebay, like most other companies, is loath to actually increase headcount unless they can show that doing so will pay off in terms of an increased bottom line. Even though paying someone to monitor such things would probably be a good business practice, it's not clear that doing so would result in more sales for ebay. In other words, there's not a clear cut return on investment for ebay to police such things.

Since outright fraud is actually somewhat rare on ebay (in terms of the percentage of total transactions), they're able to get away with turning a blind eye to the few instances of genuine, intentional fraud. Obviously certain categories are more prone to fraud than others, but when taken as a whole, it's pretty unusual. Ironically, the fact that 99% of sellers are honest, it makes it easier for the fraudsters to get away with it. ebay has probably made the calculation that it's cheaper for them to compensate buyers via the ebay guarantee than to hire a bunch of people to look out for the small percentage of genuine fraud that occurs.

Well I know on the coin side of ebay it is more perilous since they eliminated the watch group.... more outright fakes being sold and it's harder to get those listings pulled. Used to be the fakes were such horrible quality but the technology is improving.

-MV

And it is now *impossible* to get a bad stamp listing pulled. You can use the "Report Item" all you want. I've *never* been able to get even ONE bad item pulled since they did away with the Enhanced Member Reporting group. At that time, there was actually a couple of live people whose job it was to receive and act upon our reports. Not now. As far as I can tell, there is NO human being that actually reviews the "Report Item". If there is, he/she is a total moron, as I've reported lots of seriously bad (fakes, forgeries, etc) stuff and not one has ever ben removed. Great system!

And that's why we invented Stamp Smarter. So that at least there is some site where you can report bad items, get it on record, and it is there for anyone to see who is a member (free!).

To make it worse, in the recent past (some time in the last 3 months I think) they announced they were laying people off, so even less chance of things getting acted on.

Adding insult to injury right there! Buyer beware I guess huh? Thank you for stamp smarter too!

I just noticed that when you view Feedback ebay now lets you see the item in question. Wasn't this function gone for quite a while?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_odk...&_sacat=3461;

A search of the "sold" unused #477s shows us this stamp, but also shows us another copy, supposedly sold last year by hmorgan10, but amazingly shows up again this year - selling for much less than the first "sale"! While there are legitimate reasons this could happen, it defies common sense when you see it over and over again wih the same group of "cartel" sellers.

Competing sellers have probably abused the reporting function to the point that ebay doesn't even pay attention to it.

Their feedback policy specifically states that negative feedback can be removed if it was left by the competition. So if they're leaving bad feedback for one another, there's no doubt they're reporting one another's items as well.

Shills can sure make one put a chill on one's hot bidding.

Anyways, this reminds me of as a child misreading "served chilled" on a wine bottle as "serve child" so that when the adults refused to let me have a taste, I pointed out to them that it said on it "serve child" to which I was corrected and told it was "serve chilled" along with its meaning.