Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #2

PhilipCohen · Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 117 Location: Sydney, Australia

http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24296

Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #2

Shining some light on the more sophisticated and therefore slightly harder to detect shill bidding activity by many “professional” sellers on eBay auctions

9 September 2009; revised 4 December 2009

Non Sequitur by Wiley

This statement, made by eBay’s Department of Spin, on 26 August 2009, is, of course, just that: pure, unadulterated, “spin”. And if you believe any part of this statement, you may as well believe that there are fairies at the bottom of your garden too. As Danae’s cartoon philosophy will attest, the truth of the matter is the exact opposite, and the only time eBay goes through the exercise of even looking like they are doing anything about criminal activity on their marketplaces is when the media or the authorities occasionally put some pressure on them.

And, to paraphrase what a correspondent recently told me, when you attempt to resell at auction on eBay, desirable collectibles that you had some years earlier bought at auction on eBay, and you cannot achieve half what you originally paid for them [if you can even get a bid], you realise that everything is not “rosy” on the “Road to San Jose”.

But, seriously, this is the reason why eBay has made so many poor decisions in recent years, they are so busy spinning fairy stories for their consumers, and for the stock market and its gullible analysts in an effort to maintain the share price, that they are continually too giddy to make a logical decision about anything else.

I particularly like the following bit of “Ho-speak” recently out of eBay apparently in an email response to an AuctionBytes question about some matter or other:

Is that not the most beautiful piece of child-like prose that you have ever read? You need an MBA to be able to write like this? I suspect that the “small staff adjustments” means more “pink slips” are coming (starting with the 400 Teutons) to reduce eBay’s outgoings to help counterbalance the further reduction in marketplaces revenues that will undoubtedly be disclosed on 22 October (assuming we can separate such detail out of all the other “Ho-speak” spin). The wording of this statement can surely only have been composed by a particularly immature idiot child: clearly it was not passed by anyone with any word skills from the Department of Spin.

And so, further to my earlier detailed case study of naive shill bidding on eBay, posted at
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24033
I offer the following study of the more sophisticated and therefore harder to detect “professional” shill bidders who are now endemic on eBay; such activity made harder to detect and even harder to keep track of over time by eBay’s masking of bidders’ (already anonymous) unique IDs; as a consequence the bidding process is even less transparent, and buying at an eBay auction is very much more problematic.

Synopsis

 the linked spreadsheet analysis of some eBay auction data, once again, demonstrates that—contrary to their claims—eBay does not have any effective “proactive” nor “sophisticated” tools for the detection of undisclosed vendor (“shill”) bidding and that such criminal activity is rampant on eBay auctions; and eBay cannot but be aware of this fact;

 the only shill bidding that eBay even pretends to be concerned about is that which can still be detected, and is reported, by users; that which goes undetected by users, goes undetected, period, and provides eBay with a higher “final valuation fee” (FVF);

 indeed, very little of the auction system security, that eBay claims to offer buyers, exists in fact;

 eBay has no effective matter-of-course verification of users: unscrupulous sellers can apparently have as many bidding IDs as they may have email addresses, and clearly there is no effective matter-of-course cross checking of such IDs; supposedly banned sellers simply reinvent themselves and start selling again; and eBay would know that too;

 there is a flourishing trade in eBay “feedback,” at $0.01 per increment, between such unscrupulous sellers; and eBay would be aware of that too;

 by the demonstrable lack of any effectual system to proactively detect shill bidding, eBay has always effectively, and knowingly, “aided and abetted” unscrupulous shill-bidding sellers to defraud naïve—and some not so naïve—buyers, and by so doing, eBay benefits financially from the resulting higher FVF;

 the recent masking of bidding IDs with non-unique, absolutely anonymous, (periodically changing?) aliases serves no purpose other than to further obscure all but the most naive of shill bidding, making it difficult for even experienced buyers to protect themselves and track suspicious bidding activity over time, and defeats utterly any attempt at programmatic analysis of bidding patterns to expose such criminal activity;

 in the normal course of events, only those sellers who, by their utterly naïve and blatant shill bidding activities, so embarrassing expose eBay’s lack of any effective control of this criminal activity, and are user-reported, will incur a nominal penalty from eBay, a penalty that is little more than a charade;

 when such blatant shill bidding is reported, and on those occasions when eBay is forced to accept that shill bidding has indeed occurred, the relevant listings—even past listings—immediately disappear so that there is simply no longer any evidence thereof;

 the real disingenuousness of eBay is that eBay has no interest in doing anything effective about shill bidding for to do so would undoubtedly decimate the many unscrupulous “professional” sellers that use the auction process on the eBay marketplace and on whom eBay relies for some (much?) of its revenue; to actually do something effective about such criminal activity would undoubtedly detrimentally affect eBay’s bottom line, and we could not have that now, could we? The “eBafia”: a most disingenuous, unscrupulous, dare I say, criminal organisation—eBay that is.

The detail of the matter

First of all, I am not a disgruntled eBay seller, I am predominantly a buyer, and I enjoy dabbling on eBay. What I don’t enjoy is the constant stream of patently disingenuous statements that eBay directs at users for the purpose of deceiving consumers into believing that buying via the auction process on eBay is as secure as any such process can be. Such statements are an outright deception. eBay’s auction system is not secure. eBay’s auction system is patently insecure—as every unscrupulous shill-bidding seller can attest. Nor do I appreciate having to be constantly on the alert for such unscrupulous sellers lest I be defrauded by one.

The great majority of the “Ho-speak” type statements (I would not want to denigrate the tobacco companies by describing such statements as “tobacco-speak”) that come out of eBay, like the above-quoted statement about online safety, are to most intents and purposes veracity-free, as are the nonsensical reasons given for many of the devious changes that eBay has made to the mechanics of the auction system in recent years.

eBay is not a local auction, frequented by those who understand the dangers of the auction process, and where the auctioneer may well be taking bids from insects climbing up the wall; eBay is ubiquitous, remote and every detail is digitally recorded; eBay therefore has the ability to do very much more with that data to better detect and control shill bidding.

Unfortunately, very many users undoubtedly do accept eBay’s ongoing—disingenuous—statements about the security of their auction platform and consequently they are ever exposed to the possibility of being defrauded because they don’t appreciate that the auction platform is inherently insecure particularly with respect to the activities of “professional” shill bidders.

Even more unfortunately, it would appear that many professional sellers who use the eBay auction platform also think that it is quite acceptable to shill bid on their own auctions for the purpose of attempting to obtain the price that they want for their items.

With respect to sales by the auction process, eBay is the “auctioneer”—who else can be that responsible entity?—and in most jurisdictions there is a statutory obligation for the auctioneer to not knowingly facilitate shill bidding. My contention is that eBay does not do anything proactively effective because it is not in eBay’s financial interests to do so, and by the lack of any such effective proactive action eBay effectively—and knowingly—aids and abets unscrupulous sellers to defraud buyers.

This is another of eBay’s nonsensical and most disingenuous statements that appears at the top of the Bid History page: the seller gets all of the information; the genuine bidders get very little information to help protect themselves from being defrauded.

Since eBay has masked all bidding IDs with non-unique aliases (comprised of two characters: about 1600 possible combinations), it is no longer possible for genuine bidders to be certain about anything. And that is, undoubtedly, the principal purpose for such masking.

Some people naively believe eBay’s fairy story that the masking of the unique bidder IDs was introduced to “help keep the eBay community safe”, to “protect” bidders from scam emails; this is nonsense; the “problem” of scam emails—if it ever was a real problem—was solved by the blocking of access to bidders’ direct email addresses.

Some others claim to believe that such masking was introduced to protect users who had apparently used their email address “name” as their eBay user ID and were receiving scam emails on that basis: emails were supposedly being spammed to eBay IDs with alternative common ISP provider names (ie, eBayID@aol / yahoo / hotmail / gmail / etc). I consider this reason, if it was ever actually put by eBay, to be simply too absurd to contemplate.

And to any other eBay apologists I would simply say that if eBay had—as they claim to have—any truly “proactive” and “sophisticated” systems in place for the detection of shill bidding, there should be very little shill bidding for users to detect, and my above-mentioned earlier case study of examples of naïve and blatant shill bidding (that eBay subsequently agreed were examples of shill bidding) clearly indicates that they indeed have no such effective system. The simple fact is, shill bidding that goes undetected by users, goes undetected, period.

The only shill bidding eBay reluctantly does anything about is that which is detected and reported by users, and for the confirmation thereof or otherwise by eBay, I have no doubt that eBay relies on some very unsophisticated system of data matching: if there is no common IP address then there will be no “proof” that anything untoward has taken place. And of course, the sophisticated shill-bidding professional seller will have a separate internet service for his shill bidding activity and so he won’t be detected by the likes of eBay’s primitive reactive analysis.

It should then be clear to any thinking person that the non-unique masking of bidder IDs (particularly that form of masking still suffered by users in the UK) never had anything to do with the “security” of bidders—indeed, as Wiley’s Danae well understands, just the very opposite is the case—it has only ever been about the obscuring of all but the most naïve of shill bidding so that this criminal activity would be less of a problem—for eBay, that is.

Such non-unique masking also stops third-party providers, such as “GoofBay”, from applying truly sophisticated algorithms to eBay’s bidding data to expose the type of sophisticated shill bidding that would otherwise be difficult for genuine bidders to manually detect—and certainly not possible to detect on an individual-auction basis from eBay’s Bid History pages. One can only assume that the regular exposure, by third parties, of such criminal activity did not suit eBay.

The Bid History Details pages, provided supposedly as a counterbalance to the masking of bidders’ IDs, contains a “30-Day Summary”. You have to ask, why does this summary cover only the past 30 days and not 90 days, or be infinite? I would submit that eBay’s “nod, nod, wink, wink”, attitude to sophisticated shill bidding requires that “professional” shill bidders be able to “refresh” their shill IDs by rotating them over as short a “summary” period as possible. If the summary was over 90 days, unscrupulous sellers would each need probably 30 shill IDs instead of maybe 10, if the summary was infinite, heaven forbid! And that is where a spreadsheet analysis of some of a seller’s earlier auctions can be most enlightening.

Further, unless you have independently recorded the auction number(s), you will be limited to viewing only the past 14 day’s worth of a seller’s completed auctions. Why not the full 90 day’s worth you may ask? You might think, well, you can access those completed auctions via the seller’s feedback forum. Not quite. When a seller “buys” his own item, then avoids eBay’s FVF, no feedback is left or received so information about such “sales” disappears after 14 days.

eBay continues to, disingenuously, claim that shill bidding is a minor problem that they have under control. I would suggest that, following the introduction of “hidden bidders”, shill bidding has blossomed and is now running so rampant on eBay auctions that eBay, of course, cannot but be aware of it, and any examination by eBay of the number of claims by such unscrupulous sellers who, having bid on and won their own auctions, then claim that the “buyer did not pay” to avoid eBay’s FVF, would suffice. This simple spreadsheet analysis clearly demonstrates that eBay has no effective proactive system to control this criminal activity and that is an indictment of eBay’s total lack of principles in dealing with their “buying” consumers.

In anticipation of the “spin” that the eBafia’s “made men” will undoubtedly again put on my research, I will again reiterate that, what I consider to be, many examples of obvious and probable shill bidding in the linked spreadsheet are not simply a (further) “few examples” from the “100 million” eBay listings, but are from only some “hundreds” of listings mostly from my areas of personal interest.

Unlike eBay, I don’t have the capacity to programmatically check every auction, I only look at those auctions for items that interest me or for items from those sellers (usually “professional” traders) that are regularly listing items for sale, some of whom I have suspected of shill bidding. Not all the sellers that I have analysed and are listed in the spreadsheet have any appearance of shill bidding but are left in the list for comparison purposes.

Again, unlike eBay, I have to work with the non-unique aliases that are not only dynamic in that the accompanying feedback values, that supposedly serve to differentiate bidders at a moment in time, may increment over time. Also, the two-letter alias is apparently also changed on a quarterly basis (what possible purpose could that serve other than to make such analysis problematic—which, undoubtedly, is eBay’s intention).

As the masked bidding aliases are not unique it is also now possible to have more than one bidder on the same auction with the same alias—as is demonstrated in this spreadsheet list. Even though eBay appends the bidder’s feedback count, which may help to differentiate like aliases at a given moment in time, this can never be definitive; however unlikely, it is possible to have multiple bidders with the same alias and the same or similar feedback count; also, in the normal course of events, feedback counts may increment, making it difficult to even manually analyse such data over any time, and certainly impossible to programmatically do any such analysis.

Then, auction data remains available on line for only 90 days and there is now no way to identify an underbidder uniquely to see if that bidder has a longer-term relationship with the seller that may suggest shill activity (shills that win auctions rarely leave or receive feedback, but that in itself is an indicator that it is a shill) and, of course, the quarterly changing of even these masked aliases effectively stops that analysis too.

You can imagine how much more positive any such analysis could be if we still had the unique (albeit anonymous) bidders’ IDs to work with: then we would be able to further investigate a bidder’s bona fides. Clearly, eBay has decided that that is not in eBay’s interests.

Of course, eBay has access to those unique IDs, and eBay could do such a much more effective analysis. After all, such a simple analysis is not that difficult, even I can do it with a spreadsheet, and some effort.

Why then won’t eBay do such an analysis? Undoubtedly they have already done such an analysis, and because such analysis will have shown just how much apparent shill bidding is going on, they prefer to not talk about it, and they won’t do anything effective about the problem lest their “bottom line” be detrimentally affected. The further masking of the already anonymous bidding aliases with non-unique aliases to further obscure such activity was a much simpler and less revenue-threatening—albeit disingenuous—way of dealing with the problem.

Regardless, even without the aid of a truly sophisticated shill-detection software algorithm, it still comes down to the “pattern” of bidding by the suspected shill bidder with the seller: how many auctions, what types of items, the proportion of auctions therefrom, timing of bids, number of bids, etc.

But, bear in mind that, alone, a high percentage of “Bid activity with this seller” may or may not be an indication of shill bidding: 100% of bid activity on only one auction with a seller, may not be significant; 100% of bids on a number of auctions with one seller only may well be significant. Certainly, as the number of auctions of the seller that a bidder is bidding on increases—regardless of the number of bids on each auction—the probability that it is shill bidding increases exponentially.

It should, however, always be borne in mind that where a particular bidder (or bidders) does appear on more than one auction from the same seller, it is possible (to a varying degree, depending on the category of goods, eg, unique collectibles) that it could well be a genuine bidder (or bidders) interested in more than one item from that one seller. Conversely, it could be some other seller’s shill merely diluting the proportion of his own-auction bids—with never any intention to buy—so that his own-auction activity does not become obvious on the bidder’s Bid History Details page: these could be some of those bidders in the list who habitually place early “no win” value bids on many nominal-start items from various sellers.

The linked spreadsheet simply presents some facts; I draw certain conclusions from some of those facts; what conclusions you draw from those same facts is up to you.

The “private” auction

This is what I call eBay’s “classic shill bidders’ tool”. This “private” auction format (ie, “private listing - bidders' identities protected”) has always made it absolutely impossible for genuine bidders to protect themselves from such criminal activity. Notwithstanding that such “private” auctions will most likely have a higher ratio of bids to bidders thereon than a standard auction may have (I wonder why?), there is simply no way of analysing the bidding on such auctions. (Indeed, a high ratio of bids to bidders is always a potential red flag, regardless of the type of auction.)

Some are listed in the spreadsheet because the usually higher number of bids combined with a higher ratio of bids to bidders on such auctions is a telling phenomenon and the reader can come to their own conclusion as to why that would be so. If it is because shill bidding is in play, only eBay can know, because they alone have access to the underlying, anonymous, unique bidder IDs—but they aren’t going to tell us anything.

The fact is, if you bid other than at the latest practicable moment (preferably only on the starting price, if you think that is a fair price) on such a “private” auction, on the balance of probability, you are going to be defrauded—and eBay would know that too.

Only a fool could possibly think, or a most disingenuous person suggest, that shill-bidding sellers have not always made much more use of this devious eBay device than ever did any seller concerned about the “privacy” of his buyer— and eBay would know that too.

In my humble opinion, the seller who elects to use the “private” auction format is either particularly naive or most likely a shill-bidding seller, and the higher the ratio of bids to bidders the more probable it will be that it is indeed a shill-bidding seller. I think that it is safer to presume that all such “private” auctions are simply hides for shill bidders—and eBay would know that too.

The sophisticated shill

The sophisticated “professional” shill-bidding seller (who does not already avail himself of eBay’s devious “private” auction format) will have multiple shill bidding IDs (as appears to be the case in many auctions listed in this spreadsheet), and will have prepared same by continually placing bids on many other low-start auctions from multiple other sellers (and probably “buying” $0.01 feedback from other like criminals), so that the percentage of “bids” with the particular seller will never appear abnormal, indeed may be thereby kept so low as to appear beyond any suspicion, and some examples of such possible “own-auction diluting” activity may be observed in this spreadsheet. The even more sophisticated shill will also “rotate” his shill IDs over the 30-Day Summary period so that there may be even less chance of them being noticed.

Patterns of bidding worthy of further analysis are not hard to find; simply search any auction category, skip over all those very, very, many items with zero bids until you come to one (or a group) with an out-of-the-ordinary number of bids thereon, then check that seller’s other items (or any “completed listings”); you may find that the seller has abnormal activity on all, or many, of his items, and the clincher, of course, will be the use of the “private” auction format (can you guess why?). And don’t think that shills are active only on 99c-start auctions; they are just as likely to be active on a $99 start.

Unlike eBay management, the sophisticated shill-bidding seller also understands the psychology of the auction process and knows how to introduce some “excitement” into his auctions. Even if he does not actually force a genuine bidder higher in price he will, using his multiple shill IDs, place a number of competing shill bids early on in an auction, thereby attempting to attract genuine buyers by creating an impression that his item (alone?) is being competed for by other bidders and is therefore a desirable thing.

As this spreadsheet analysis only examines the information on the auction primary Bid History page (not the individual bidders’ Bid History Details pages) and looks for the appearance of common bidders on a particular seller’s auctions, most of the suspected shill bidders in this collection will probably fall into this “less obvious” category, and may not stand out on their Bid History Details pages. It therefore is never sufficient to examine the bid history details for only the auction in which you are interested; you must also examine, at least, the primary Bid History pages of some other auctions from the same seller for the appearance of an abnormal number of common bidders that may indicate that shill bidding is in play, such as is demonstrated in many of the examples listed in this spreadsheet analysis.

Needless to say, none of these comments apply to the UK site where the style of masked alias (“Bidder x”) makes it simply impossible for genuine bidders to do any such spreadsheet analysis; users of the UK site are now able to protect themselves only from the most blatantly obvious and naïve of shill bidders that may stand out on the individual Bid History Details pages. The sophisticated shills (such as those that you may consider are exposed in this spreadsheet) now have free reign in the UK with absolutely no risk of detection: they now don’t even need to resort to the “private” auction format to defraud buyers—and eBay would know that, too.

Multiple shill IDs

The single ID nibbling away at another’s proxy bid may appear suspect to many buyers who bother to watch the auction’s Bid History page. Less obvious is the two- or three-ID shill-bidding mechanism.

The smarter shill bidder will have at least two shill IDs competing against each other in small increments until the genuine high bidder’s maximum proxy bid is exposed. And then they will both stop competing. Gee, I wonder why?

So, if you have been naïve enough to make your maximum proxy bid early-on in the auction and you observe a pattern of such competing bidding that stops just short of your maximum proxy bid, then you should consider retracting your bid and letting the unscrupulous seller buy it himself; the item will undoubtedly be relisted for sale again later on.

And, the even smarter shill-bidding seller may even have made the high proxy bid himself too, and will then use his other competing underbidding shill IDs to give genuine buyers the impression that there is interest by other bidders in the item when there may well be no interest at all.

Don’t worry about the FVF, if the seller wins his own item, that can be avoided simply by claiming that the “buyer did not pay”, and gee, guess what, shills never pay, and “mutually agreed” bid retractions and sale cancellations are apparently not recorded in the shill’s Bid History Details statistics.

Don’t you just love the way eBay, in reality, looks after those very people neither they nor the sellers can survive without—the buyers. And undoubtedly, with more and more buyers realising that, that is why there are less buyers about these days.

Consignment listing

Some sellers will use the services of an eBay consignment seller. The seller can then shill bid on the auction for his item with no chance of being detected other that by the suspect manner of his bidding.

In such circumstances there will be no common IP address so eBay will find no “smoking gun”.

Renaming IDs

Recently I noticed that a particular bidder that I happened to be watching had a change of alias un-accompanied by any indication from eBay of such a change. In the past, such changes used to be advertised by eBay (at least prior to their devious masking of bidding IDs) by the appearance of a small “recycle” style symbol alongside the new ID; but no more, apparently.

I can only assume that eBay has decided that it is not in eBay’s interest that we users should be aware of such change of a user’s disguise and so we are now unable to keep track of such anonymous bidding aliases that we might suspect of shill bidding activity.

Shill bidders can apparently now periodically rename their well-worn shill bidding IDs and we simple consumers can be none the wiser.

One more deception by eBay on the consumer?

The spreadsheet

Can I repeat my earlier statement: The linked spreadsheet simply presents some facts regarding patterns of bidding on some sellers’ auctions. Some of the sellers I have analysed are obviously not involved in shill bidding but are left in for comparison purposes. From the analysis of some others I draw certain conclusions; what conclusions you draw from those same facts is up to you.

The spreadsheet summarises the data from the primary Bid History page. This data can be sorted by a number of pre-defined compound sorts designed to expose bidding patterns that indicate levels of likelihood of shill bidding. Some of those “levels of likelihood” in this list go well beyond simple “likelihood”. And eBay would be aware of that too.

The bidders’ feedback counts are those extant on the noted date that this “dynamic” data was collected and may increment over time. The, always superfluous, three asterisks included by eBay in the masked bidding aliases have been removed, and those aliases that appear more than once on a seller’s auctions have been flagged with an asterisk.

(And, you have to ask yourself, what sort of infantile-like logic was used when eBay made the decision to include three superfluous asterisks in the masked aliases? And, let’s not bother to ask eBay why they chose not to create unique masked IDs …)

The somewhat consistent “rolling” nature of the appearance of some pairs of some of these flagged bidding IDs on some sellers’ auctions suggests that some of these sellers may have attended the same “How to Shill Bid” seminar or, more likely, they are subscribing to a third-party shill bidding service.

You may also notice, if you sort the spreadsheet by “Bidders” only, that even when one of these flagged aliases appears on another seller’s auction (sans flag), they are almost never the winning bidder and may well be one of those bidders making very early nominal-type bids on others sellers’ auctions for the purpose of diluting the proportion of bidding on their own auctions.

As we are here interested in the bidders rather than the number of bids, each bidder’s highest bid only is recorded to help make such activity more noticeable. What I have not currently recorded (too much effort involved) in the spreadsheet is the number of bids made by each bidder (from each bidder’s “Details” page) which would, of course, give further insight into the purpose of the bidding.

At the extreme, some of the listed sellers actually have many more obvious shill IDs bidding (and sometimes winning) than there are genuine bidders, for example, the seller “art.warren” has multiple “shill” IDs outnumbering genuine bidders on his auctions by about 10:1. His shilling is rarely successful and one of his own shill IDs more often than not wins his auctions. Whether eBay gets any FVF out of such “sales” would be a good question; certainly this vendor appears to be selling very little to genuine bidders. (His most recent auctions, sans shilling, get no bids at all.) Then not that many, even scrupulous, sellers in this category (“Paintings”) appear to be selling very much these days—times are tough!

Undoubtedly, when such unscrupulous sellers buy their own goods they then avoid eBay’s FVF with excuses such as “buyer did not pay” or “agreed to cancel sale” (of course, shills never pay and consequently never leave or receive feedback), and you would think that eBay would be keeping an eye upon such activity, as any such fee avoidance comes directly off their “bottom line profit,” and if eBay is so accepting of such fee avoidance then that also would suggest that eBay knows very well what is going on.

The red flags

If you intend bidding on anything of any value from a seller that you have not dealt with previously, before doing so, you should at least examine the seller’s “completed listings” (if any) for the previous 14-days for any sign of any common bidders appearing too frequently, which could be an indication of shill bidding activity.

When looking at a competing bidder’s Bid History Details page—particularly that of a nibble-bidding competitor—you should also watch for any great deal of losing bid activity on multiple other sellers’ auctions: this type of activity may be an indicator that the bidder is thereby diluting the record of his bidding on his own auctions. Of course, eBay’s masking of bidders’ IDs means that such analysis can now only be done with a collection of data as is compiled in this spreadsheet.

Let’s face it, genuine bidders either (naively) “nibble” bid or they eventually wise up and “snipe” a strategic single bid near the end. The appearance of any bidding patterns in between these two extremes, particularly any nibble bidding by a high feedback ID, should be looked upon as a potential “red flag.”

Also, as is demonstrated in the abovementioned linked earlier AuctionBytes post, eBay’s “proxy” bidding system is so open to abuse by unscrupulous sellers that to set a maximum proxy bid early on in an auction can be an invitation to indeed pay the maximum that you have indicated you are prepared to pay.

A very low feedback count is a potential “red flag”: every new user starts with zero feedback, but there seems to be a plethora of such “newbie” bidders in recent times. But do they actually buy anything? If every shill bidding seller now has 10–20 bidding IDs, and they all start with zero feedback ... (Maybe this is from whence eBay is getting its recently claimed increase in users.)

Another potential “red flag” is a seller’s listings switching from auctions to fixed-price “Buy It Now” type listings; this could be part of one of the “nominal” penalties imposed by eBay when a seller is reported for, and is found to have been, (blatantly) shill bidding. (Unscrupulous sellers don’t like “fixed price” listings because, if you can’t get what you want for an item at auction with a nominal start, without shill bidding it, it’s not going to sell for the price you want at a fixed price.)

The other very obvious “red flag” can be the regular appearance of a particular “non winning” bidding ID on a seller’s auctions, with a low “Bid activity with this seller,” but with never any, or little, incrementing of their feedback count. Such status can only be maintained by the diluting of own-auction bidding activity by much nominal no-win bidding activity on other sellers’ auctions.

New “View Item” page

eBay is in the process of introducing a new “View Item” page. You may notice that the “High bidder” is no longer recorded on this initial page: you now have to look to the Bid History page for any information on bidders, which makes it just that bit harder for genuine bidders to spot a known common bidder placing an early (surreptitious “reserve”) bid on a seller’s auctions. Now, why would eBay do that?

And, the “starting details”: price and date, have also disappeared. Now, why would they do that? (Shill bidding is much more likely to occur on items with a very low starting price relative to their market value.)

And on top of all that, now, the only way you will know that an auction is of the type “private” (ie, eBay’s classic shill bidders’ auction format), before any bids have been placed and you look at the Bid History page, will be by the line “This is a private listing and your identity will not be disclosed to anyone except the seller” tucked away, without any emphasis thereon, at the very bottom of the View Item page. eBay fails to mention that you also won’t be able to see who is bidding against you; only the seller is privy to such information!

Of course, this notice of “private auction” should be very prominently displayed, at the top of the View Item page, as it used to be, so that buyers can make an informed choice to avoid sellers who elect to use this patently devious shill bidders’ device. Indeed a notice of such “private” auction should also be displayed on any such auctions in all search listings so that buyers can choose to not waste their time looking further at these shill bidders’ auctions.

Every time one turns around there is more and more eBay-introduced obscurity; when will it end? Presuming that these people at eBay are not all simply stupid people, the only reason for such changes to the View Item page (and of the lack of any post sale details on Best Offer sales) can be to further obscure matters. And I think we all understand why anyone ever wants to make any matter less transparent, don’t we?

But, if you are one of those buyers that are still dabbling on eBay, you don’t need to worry, as eBay’s (claimed) “proactive” and “sophisticated” shill detection systems will root out these fraudsters before they get a chance to cheat you ...

eBay’s CEO, “Noise” Donahoe, is not known as “Ho Ho Ho” without good reason.

Verification of Users

eBay has no effective matter-of-course verification of users (where have I heard that statement before):

Hallandale man admits to eBay fraud

South Florida Sun Sentinel

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/hallandale/sfl-ebay-fraud-conviction,0,4079887.story

Over five years! Thousands of eBay customers! 5,500 items! Numerous complaints! 260 aliases! (This is undoubtedly from where “Noise” Donahoe gets his claimed “increase in users”.)

What more do the authorities need to appreciate that eBay’s lack of effective security for its “buying” customers makes it little more that a (knowing) facilitator for such fraudsters? The amount of such fraud that eBay’s “clunky” system facilitates must be an ongoing nightmare for all concerned.

Is it any wonder that the Police are reluctant to get involved in any but the most egregious of instances: they simply don’t have the resources to police this modern-day “eBafia” and its many petty (and some not so petty) “made men” fraudsters.

“Dealing” in feedback

A reader recently pointed out to me that if the feedback of a shill’s IDs is incrementing at all it is quite likely that the (even smarter) shill will achieve such movement by the device offered by sellers such as “helpula77” (and worldsapphire09, shirtap197409, five*star*seller, oriental_legend, …) whereby items of effectively nil value are offered for sale at a $0.01 start with free shipping; both buyer and seller can artificially improve their feedback profiles for the cost of a few cents per increment—and eBay would know that too.

If you look at this seller’s list of items for sale, these effectively valueless items are almost the only items with any bids thereon. You have to then ask yourself why eBay allows such—commercially absurd—$0.01 starts with free shipping. (I was also told that the potential for such abuse was supposedly the reason that eBay banned digitally-delivered items, but that does not make any sense as eBay is now allowing these nominal-start, free-shipping, auctions, the only purpose of which can only be to subvert the feedback process.)

The extent of this obvious abuse can be observed by refining an eBay search to “Price $0.01 to $0.10”, setting your preferences to “Free postage” and “Worldwide” then doing a search for “free” in “All categories”; that currently results in several thousand items being offered at $0.01 with free postage (bid for your cheap feedback now!); switching preferences to show “Completed listings” (past 14 days) is even more revealing: there’s a whole lot of people buying “Murano glass beads” from “helpula77,” one bead at a time. … If all that manual fiddling with preferences is a bit to hard, take the easy way and use this link thereto. You could then do the same exercise for Price $0.01 to $1.00.

You may also notice that some of these dealers in feedback also elect to use the “private” auction format: they are selling $0.01 items and they naturally assume that the buyers would prefer such privacy. Gee, I can’t imagine why? Maybe eBay can tell us …

Of course, now that all bidders are masked and cannot be uniquely (even anonymously) identified, we can no longer ascertain if a bidder on an auction, in which we may be interested, has been dealing in abnormal quantities of items of such nominal value.

No doubt about it, eBay knows how to obscure matters …

You then have to ask yourself, apart from enabling “Noise” Donahoe to spin stories to the stockholders and the stock market about the number of listings on eBay increasing (at the same time as its revenue is decreasing), what purpose do any of these “commercially absurd” nominal-start listings serve?

Is anyone actually making any money out of such listings?

Regardless, what genuine buyer wants to buy something worth only 99c and then pay postage to get it? What scrupulous seller wants to sell something for 99c and then have to spend time packing it for posting? Certainly, no professional dealer is interested in selling anything for 99c (assuming they can get a genuine bid).

Is it any wonder then that the shills are running rampant—as often as not, “buying” their own goods?

So, “feedback” per se would seem to be of dubious value when assessing any eBay user—especially, an unscrupulous one, and particularly so while eBay persists in not publishing the sale price of items purchased, in the feedback of buyers with “private” feedback nor in the feedback for sellers using eBay’s “classic shill-bidding device,” the “private” listing, nor when such detail is otherwise deleted from feedback listings more than 90 days old.

And, as always, most of the problems of the eBay marketplace are of eBay’s own making.

(Ah, eBay, I still can’t make up my mind whether it is disingenuousness, incompetence or simply stupidity on your behalf but, taking into account your various nonsensical statements about most things, I think I lean towards the first, disingenuousness.)

Summary

This spreadsheet analysis demonstrates once again that, contrary to their claims, eBay does not have any effective system for the detection and control of the criminal activity of shill bidding, and that such activity is now running rampant on their auction system; nor does eBay have any reason to do anything about it while governmental consumer affairs regulators, apparently, see no problem with eBay, in effect, aiding and abetting such criminal activity.

With the exception of a couple of the sellers who were reported to me (and who have previously also been reported to eBay), the rest are a random selection of sellers who habitually use a low starting price relative to the value of the goods. Not all the sellers so analyzed over a number of auctions have any appearance of shill bidding but those are left in the list for comparison purposes. The ratio of scrupulous to apparently unscrupulous sellers in this group is simply frightening—and eBay would be aware of that too.

Does eBay—as they claim—actually do anything, in any “proactive” and/or any truly “sophisticated” manner, to control shill bidding? The answer has to be an emphatic “No, beyond any doubt, they do not”.

Does eBay even care about such fraud? “No, they do not”: undetected successful shill bidding simply increases eBay’s revenue from the resulting higher FVF.

eBay is its own worst enemy. Doing nothing but attempting to further obscure shill bidding has sapped the confidence of many experienced buyers: it’s simply too much effort to have to be constantly on the look out for the unscrupulous “professional” sellers that now infest eBay auctions.

I can well understand why “Noise” Donahoe may well prefer all listings to be “fixed price”, the auction system is, and probably always has been, so open to abuse it is simply comical; but without auctions, eBay would not then be the same and, if and when the last auction is run, someone will have to remember to turn off the lights.

The real problem Donahoe has is that the eBay marketplace is little more than a “house of cards”; if so many of the “professional” dealers trading thereon cannot make a living except by bidding on their own auctions, then that suggests that their removal from the system would greatly reduce eBay’s revenues and devastate their profits, and probably reduce eBay’s capital value by seventy-five percent. Then, too, there is always the possibility that one day a governmental consumer affairs regulator will do the job they are charged with and, with a few puffs, blow the house down. (What say you about that scenario, John?)

Non Sequitur by Wiley

Regrettably, since its public listing, eBay has become (if it was not always) simply a corporate structure that surrounds a group of most greedy, devious, unscrupulous, disingenuous, incompetent, managing executives whose only interest is the recovery of their “lost” —I suspect forever—performance bonuses, and whose total lack of scruples represents the ugliest face of the free enterprise system—ie, profits (read, bonuses) before principles—which, deservedly, is ultimately the road to oblivion for such organizations: while eBay burns, “Noise” Donahoe fiddles.

I always refer to eBay users as “users”, for to refer to them as “members”, as eBay does, is to imply that the organisation is run for some benefit of those “members”—it is not: No action taken (or not taken) by eBay management has anything to do with benefiting or protecting eBay users (buyers or sellers); eBay’s every action (or lack thereof) is purposed solely towards benefitting eBay, by whatever means—undoubtedly more to do with the recovery of those “lost” executive performance bonuses than with any direct consideration for shareholders—and if at any time there appears to be some benefit to eBay “users”, that will be purely coincidental.

I conclude that nothing that eBay says can be accepted at face value. All eBay statements require translation and if you interpret anything that they say as probably meaning the exact opposite of what they say you will be on petty safe ground. And if you want some more good examples, of what I refer to as eBay’s deceptive “Ho-speak,” they can be found at this link.

The fact that eBay has been able to get away with effectively, and knowingly, aiding and abetting unscrupulous sellers to defraud consumers for so long is a damning measure of the effectiveness of governmental consumer affairs regulators the world over; for what is their purpose, if not to protect we simple peasants from the machinations of such unscrupulous commercial organisations as eBay?

If you need any further evidence that eBay’s senior managing executives are either totally incompetent or are knowingly aiding and abetting criminal fraudsters, take a journey through an analysis of a selection of auctions by two Diamond PowerSellers (BeckerTime and QuickShipElectronics) that were recently put forward by eBay as being major success stories of selling on eBay. Both sellers clearly appear to be habitual shill bidders and, I would suggest, that eBay management, if they have any competence at all, cannot but be aware of that probability. eBay’s ongoing claims that they have “sophisticated, proactive” tools for the detection of such shill bidding are patently false and such claims are made solely for the purpose of deceiving consumers and are, in effect, a fraud on consumers who buy on eBay. Separate detailed post thereon at:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502763

If somehow you missed the embedded link in the opening synopsis, the latest spreadsheet (2MB+), and notes on the use thereof, can be viewed/downloaded from:
http://home.exetel.com.au/philipcohen/eBay/

If you have gotten this far but still do not (want to) recognise the basis of my criticism of eBay, so be it. If otherwise, you may also appreciate my earlier-mentioned detailed case study of naive shill bidding on eBay, posted at
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24033

For anyone that is interested a summary of, and some comment on, the statute law on fraud by “false representation” in the US. UK and Australia, is posted at
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24316

Anyone wishing to offer comment directly on this matter can contact the author, Philip Cohen, at formset@exemail.com.au

PS: If anyone is interested in obtaining a single-page analysis of the bidders on an individual eBay auction—the way that competing bidder information should have been (more effectively) presented by eBay—try the link: http://www.ebuster.co.uk/bidhistory.aspx
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

PhilipCohen · Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 117 Location: Sydney, Australia

http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502417#6502417

The deviousness of eBay

A summary of the many ways in which eBay knowingly facilitates the activities of unscrupulous sellers to defraud buyers on eBay auctions

9 September 2009; revised 10 October 2009

1. “Private” auctions (eBay’s classic shill bidders’ tool): There is no differentiation of bidders on the individual auction and the Bid History page is therefore just one great big black hole. I don’t know why eBay bothers to provide this primary Bid History page for such auctions as it tells the genuine bidder virtually nothing. (Well, actually, it does tell you something: if you bid on and win such an auction you will prodably have been defrauded.)

There are, consequently, no individual Bid History Details pages for such auctions; therefore there is no measure of any bid retractions—or anything else: the seller’s shill can place a ridiculously high bid, establish the maximum proxy bid of the highest bidder, retract his high bid with an excuse such as “wrong amount” and then set a “losing” bid just below the genuine bidder’s maximum. The winning bidder at such an auction is most probably going to pay his proxy-set maximum—if he was indeed naive enough to have set one. A most outrageous, devious, deceptive structure!

This is the reason that such “private” auctions usually have a higher ratio of bids to bidders thereon than ordinary auctions. No experienced bidder—at least not one with a brain larger than the size of a pea—would “nibble bid” on such an auction. And the presumption must be that most of the activity on such auctions, particularly if the ratio of bids to bidders is great, is undisclosed vendor (shill) bidding—and eBay knows that too.

And on top of all that, now, the only way you will know that an auction is “private” before any bids have been placed and you look at the Bid History page, will be by the line “This is a private listing and your identity will not be disclosed to anyone except the seller” tucked away, without any emphasis thereon, at the very bottom of the View Item page. eBay also fails to mention that you also won’t be able to see who is bidding against you; only the seller is privy to such information!

Of course, the notice of “private auction” should be very prominently displayed, at the top of the page as it used to be, , so that buyers can make an informed choice to avoid sellers who elect to use this patently devious shill bidders’ device.

The fact is, anyone who makes other than a last moment “snipe” bid (at the starting price) on such an auction is probably going to be defrauded—and eBay knows that too.

2. “Bidder x” (UK and the Philippines): These aliases are reassigned for every auction; they are “dynamic” in the most extreme sense. They are fractionally less opaque than the “private” auction only in the sense that the bidders on the individual auction are differentiated and you could therefore, in combination with the “percent of bids with this seller” from the Bid History Details page, be warmed of the possibility of a naive shill “nibbling” at a genuine bidder’s proxy maximum. No further analysis is possible; the sophisticated shill has no fear of detection—and eBay knows that too.

3. “a***b (x)” (rest of the world): These non-unique aliases (comprising two characters: about 1600 possibilities), on the other hand, appear to remain static for at least three months (?); only the feedback count “(x)” may increment. And some manual spreadsheet analysis can be done on this bidding data to expose the more sophisticated shills that cannot be detected from the information on the Bid History Details page. But, such non-unique anonymity still defeats any truly sophisticated, automated, shill analysis of such data—and eBay knows that too.

Unique Bidder IDs: The underlying user IDs were always anonymous. The fact is, the uniqueness of these underlying anonymous IDs enabled the definitive ongoing anonymous tracking of bidding activity (by third parties such as “GoofBay”) that invariably exposed sophisticated shill bidding, and this, one can only assume, did not suit eBay.

It was also possible to track the amount of a bidders’ activity with a particular seller via the feedback forum—not so any more.

And, again, eBay’s claim that the further masking (of these underlying anonymous unique aliases with non-unique aliases) was done to protect bidders’ security is demonstrably disingenuous—any problem with fraudulent “Second Chance Offers”, etc, being directed at underbidders (or winners), if it ever was a real problem, was solved by the blocking of access to users’ direct email addresses.

Bid retraction: I am led to believe that the “bid retractions” statistic, that is recorded in the 30-Day Summary on the bidder’s Bid History Details page, does not register “mutually agreed” bid retractions. As any bids retracted by a shill will, undoubtedly, be “mutually agreed” with the vendor, what purpose then does this deceptive, invariably, “zero” statistic serve?

Cancel auction: If the seller “ends the listing early and cancels all bids”, eBay then publishes the confidential maximum proxy bid values that had been placed by the bidders—can you believe that? I can! Not only that but, unlike for a bidder-retracted bid, the user’s feedback counts are not supplied with the IDs of the bidders so it is, again, effectively impossible to detect IDs that may be involved in shill activity: nothing like a bit of eBay-introduced ambiguity to obscure matters.

“Private” Feedback: Seriously, given that bidding IDs are now absolutely anonymous anyway, what purpose does the selection of this mechanism by a buyer serve—other than to further obscure any patterns of possible fraudulent bidding? Bidding by such persons is now shown as “x***x (private)”. What purpose does the hiding of the bidder’s feedback count, which otherwise would serve to differentiate like-named aliases, serve other than to obscure matters, and make it more difficult for genuine bidders to protect themselves from unscrupulous sellers (and their “partner in crime”, eBay)?

“… or Best Offer”: At the end of this process there is no published detail of the bidders that made offers so there is no way for others to judge whether or not such transactions are genuine sales. No analysis of any type can be performed on this type of sale. Sales by this process could just as well be set up, by an unscrupulous seller, in an attempt to establish a value for a particular type of good.

The 30-Day Summary of Bidding

In the UK the 30-Day Summary contains:

Total bids:
Items bid on:
Bid activity (%) with this seller:
Bids to unique sellers:
Bids in unique categories:
Bid retractions:
Bid retractions (6 months):

In the rest of the eBay world it contains:

Total bids:
Items bid on:
Bid activity (%) with this seller:
Bid retractions:
Bid retractions (6 months):

What these summaries should, at the least, contain:

Total bids:
Bid activity (%) with this seller:
Auctions bid on:
Auctions bid on with this seller:
Auction activity (%) with this seller
Unique sellers bid with:
Unique categories bid in:
Bid retractions:
Bid retractions (6 mths):

And these summaries should all be for the past, at the least, 90 days, if not 180 days, not the current 30 days which makes it far too easy for unscrupulous sellers to “renew” their shill IDs by rotating them over such a short period. Then, that is quite probably the very reason that eBay has made the summary period so short.

Summary

That consumer protection bodies the world over have allowed this “auctioneer”—eBay, that is—to ever get away with such outrageously deceptive conduct towards its consumers is a damning measure of their competence and ultimately their effectiveness.
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

PhilipCohen · Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 117 Location: Sydney, Australia

eBay’s non response

As a matter of interest, I submitted a draft of this latest, at that time unpublished, case study on shill bidding to David Smith (Office of the President, eBay); he apparently passed it onto a lobotomized chimpanzee named Charles, apparently a member of the Customer Support Team, who then sent me the below boilerplate message requesting details of the “item ID in question”. (what, only one?) “so that they can help me.” This was the only response I received. (I only sent them the narrative introduction, not the spreadsheet; I did not want the auction data to disappear before publication).

The same old inference, if it is not detectable by the user then it is not a problem—for eBay, that is; indeed it’s an asset. When are these simpletons going to get the message that their users should not have to do for them the job that eBay themselves should (actually) be doing to protect their users.

I guess my form of logic is lost on the people at eBay; here I am simply suggesting that it is about time that they did, in fact, do something proactive and truly sophisticated about shill bidding—otherwise their demonstrable unscrupulousness in this respect will continue to be exposed on an ongoing basis to all and sundry, and all they can respond with is this insulting, moronic, disingenuous, boilerplate nonsense.

Clearly, they think that we are all morons. Is it any wonder that the eBay marketplace is going down the toilet.

----- Original Message -----
From: eBay Australia Customer Support - auinvestigations
To: formset@exemail.com.au
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 7:55 PM
Subject: AU90152 Thank you for contacting eBay Trust and Safety. (KMM3197527I15977L0KM)

Hello Philip,

My name is Charles and I thank you for writing back to eBay’s Customer Support.

I can certainly understand your concern over this matter and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to investigate possible shill bidding cases.

Please note that eBay takes such reports seriously. Unfortunately you haven’t sent me enough details. Please email me again with the item ID in question and I’ll be able to help you.

In reference to your concerns regarding the similar IDs such as o***h, b***7, etc; in order to protect our community members from threats such as fake Second Chance Offers, we have changed how Bidder IDs are displayed on the Bid History and Item Listing pages on eBay. In certain listings, the User IDs of bidders will no longer be displayed. We believe that this change will help to balance the need for openness and transparency in the marketplace with the need to protect our community.

The change in how Bidder IDs are displayed on the Bid History and Item Listing pages was done to help protect the privacy of our members.

I hope this information has been useful to you and please feel free to write back if you have any other concerns.

Regards,

Charles N.
eBay Customer Support Team
_______________________________
Buyer protection on eBay.com.au has improved! PayPal Buyer Protection
will now cover eligible items for AU$20,000. Conditions apply.*

*PayPal Buyer Protection and PayPal Seller Protection are subject to the
terms and conditions in PayPal’s User Agreement, …

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
Attention Mr David Smith

Dear Mr Smith,

I am an eBay user, predominantly a buyer. I am currently working on another analysis of shill bidding on eBay; this time on the less obvious, slightly more refined, shill bidding that cannot be detected via the auction Bid History pages. I have done a simple analysis of some vendors, in an Excel spreadsheet, looking for IDs that are habitually appearing on multiple auctions from individual sellers, and my narrative introduction to that spreadsheet is attached. Needless to say, the analysis indicates that this form of “refined” shill bidding, by professional sellers, is running rampant on eBay auctions. Then, you would already know that.

Of course, eBay could do an even more effective analysis of such data as you alone now have access to bidders’ unique IDs. Indeed I don’t doubt that you have already done such analyses, and undoubtedly that was the real reason that you masked the unique bidding IDs, so that others could not easily do such analyses.

Anyway, I thought I should at least give you the opportunity of correcting any errors of fact or rebutting any of the conclusions contained therein before I submit same to the media and government.

Regards
Philip Cohen
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

PhilipCohen · Joined: 14 Mar 2008 Posts: 117 Location: Sydney, Australia

http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502502#6502502

The abuse of bid retractions on eBay auctions

23 September 2009; revised 26 September 2009

Auction 280395235257 is an interesting $1-start event that I stumbled across. The following table and figures illustrate an example of a buyer who may have been defrauded following the making and retraction of a very high bid that was quite possibly made only for the purpose of establishing the maximum proxy bid amount of the ultimate winner.

Bidder “s***o (14)” (the ultimate winner) made a proxy bid of $3550 which would have made him the highest bidder, at that moment, at $203.50.

Bidder “l***j (11)” later made a bid of $3000 that would have left bidder s***o still the highest at $3050.

Bidder s***o then increased his proxy maximum bid (to $4700), and was still the high bidder at $3050.

Half an hour later, bidder “l***t (0)” (a less-than 30 days “newbie”) then made a ridiculously high bid of $40,000 that made him the winner at $4750, and three hours later retracted same (and made no further bid), which reinstated s***o as the high bidder at $3050. However, the placing of this ridiculously high bid would have exposed (for those three hours) the maximum value of the previous high bidder’s proxy bid as $4700 (ie, one increment less than $4750).

Fifteen minutes later, the ultimate underbidder “l***j (11),” who has 100% “bid activity with this seller” and has bid on no other items in the past 30 days, then—pointlessly, unless conspiring with the seller—increased his bid from $3000 to $3900.

The only question in my mind is why did they bid only $3900 when they could have bid $4700 and still have “lost” to the ultimate winner? Maybe they did not want to appear too blatant about it?

I am led to believe that, for reasons no one seems to know (and doubtless would not understand), “mutually agreed” bid retractions are not recorded on the individual bidder’s Bid History Details page; I can’t imagine why not. And you will then note that in this auction, although the bid retraction is noted on the primary Bid History page, it indeed is not noted as a retraction on the bidder’s Bid History Details page.

Also, eBay publishes the retracted bid as the value of the system-made bid ($4750), and the publishing of this value tells everyone, permanently on this page, that the high bidder’s proxy maximum was $4700; what possible purpose can this bit of utter stupidity serve?

And, this is what eBay claims is a “secure” proxy bidding system?

Of course, any such “highest bid” retractions should be noted on the primary Bid History page so that genuine bidders can be put on guard. But any retraction value quoted should be the value that was input ($40,000), not the system-made bid ($4750) that permanently exposes the highest bidder’s proxy maximum.

Regardless, I have never retracted a bid nor been involved in an auction where a bid was so retracted so I am uncertain as to what other action eBay takes thereafter to protect the genuine bidder whose proxy maximum has been so exposed. Certainly, any highest bidder whose bid is so exposed by such activity should receive a direct email notice of such shenanigans so that they are positively alerted and have the opportunity to retract their bid also. Is there any such notification? Or does the advantage lay all with the unscrupulous seller?

PS: I had to prepare my own little “table” of bids because the “Show automatic bids” function for the primary Bid History pages is currently displaying a totally garbled list of such bids—typical of eBay programming; I wonder how long it will take before it is fixed?

Auction Bid History

Auction Bid History (automatic bids exposed!)

Table of bids

Bid History Details of Underbidder

Bid History Details of Bid Retractor

Postscript

Oh, dear me, my assumptions were all wrong; here I was thinking that the buyer “s***o (14)” had probably been defrauded but here is the same item relisted (280401734190) at Buy It Now for $10,000. I always thought it logical that you first try to sell BIN for $10,000 and when that is not successful you then try a shilled auction. Any way, who knows what was going on (only eBay knows, and they aren’t telling). Maybe the winner told the seller where to go after seeing his proxy maximum exposed and subsequently “Did not pay”. Then, if the item really is worth anything like $10,000, it would seem to have been a good buy at $3950. Possibly, all the higher-value bidders were shills. Heaven forbid had a genuine bidder actually sniped the item at the last moment for $4750!

Item relisted BIN!

_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.