Agree with Kurt -- google "ebay sniping" and several well known options will appear; some free, some very inexpensive. It's a terrific way to gather vintage bits while, essentially, you sleep!
Damien Roohr
Canton,. CT
78 comp gs
82 traveler
Just program in a last second snipe bid for what you consider a reasonable price and none of these shenanigans really mean anything. Either you get it for your price or somebody else does. Either way, it's all good. Underhanded auction tactics really only work if you play along.
Kurt Sperry Bellingham, Washington USA
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 9:23 PM, verktyg <verktyg@aol.com> wrote:
> 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