Quote:
Originally Posted by Dottore
So out of curiosity, what's to prevent a seller from ramping up the price by having eg. his wife send in competing bids from her email address?
|
That's called shill bidding, and ebay will shut them down if they can establish it is going on.
In any regard, that's why it's important for you to come up with your absolute top price... for example, in the hypothetical you gave, it wouldn't be your $25K, it would be the $25.5 figure... or even $26... and throw it in at the one minute to go point.
Then if the guy shills it up past you hoping he can sucker you into a hypothetical $27-28K, you haven't been suckered.
And he's stuck with his item. I don't know how ebay sniffs out the shills... I'm sure they don't get them all, but if the same item shows up again and the guy claims the buyer backed out, that would probably flag him as a possible shill.