Shill bidding is hard to track since eBay chose to hide bidders IDs. If you suspect shill bidding you can report it to eBay but the reporting location is hard to find.
Click on "Contact Us" Type in "Shill Bidding" in the "Tell us about your problem" then click the "ASK" button.
The "Contact Us" page comes up. Scroll down to a link "Shill bidding policy" and click on it.
In the "Shill bidding policy" box, there's a "report it to us" link near the bottom. Click on it.
Then you will have to work through the drop down menu boxes to: "Listing Violations" "Fraudulent listings" "Illegal seller demands, you didn't receive item, etc" until you get to "Seller is using other accounts to inflate item price (shill bidding)"
Cut and paste or type in the auction number or numbers in the appropriate box.
You have a little box with 100 character capacity to state your complaint.
eBay will send you a notification that they received your report and that's all you get!
What I look for is someone bidding up an item who has a lot of bid retraction or no history of buying anything cycling related.
Have you ever tried to do a bid retraction? A bidder in an auction that I just reported had 4 retractions in the past month and 14 in the past 6 months. A couple of weeks ago the same bidder had 3 and 12 retractions.
BTW, eBay has been real slow the last few weeks! Checked it out in different locations around a 75 mile area.=, same results.
Chas. Colerich Oakland, CA USA
Leonard Diamond wrote:
> I'm assuming this is on topic as I'm bidding on an on topic part! If not
> I'm sure Mr Rabbit will let us know. I placed a small "place marker" bid on
> an item. With several days still to go 2 others placed bids raising mine
> automatically up to its limit. I decided to check out the other bidders to
> the extent I can nowadays on ebay. One of the bidders has made 195 bids in
> the last 30 days on 154 items. 23% of the bids were on items being sold by
> the seller of this item. Additionally on this sellers items he only bid once
> each and usually early while on other sellers items there were multiple bids
> and many in the last hour of an auction. Is this troubling, am I paranoid
> or both?
> Len Diamond
> Ridgewood, New Jersey USA