While the bidding pattern looks slightly suspicious it's also not that odd. It's not a pattern I'd worry much about. if anything, it's probably less shilling, and more an avoidance of reserve fees.
Sometimes I think we look for things to worry about.
A tale of a suspected shill .....
I bid on a jersey, a pretty rare one with good provenance. I got outbid, but not by a whole lot. Then I got a second chance offer. I took a look at the bidders history, and saw about 10 items bid on, all from the same seller. Which looked like a classic shill pattern. talked about it with a friend who suggested just ignoring the second chance offer, but still watching the sellers auctions. Figuring if it was shill bidding the item would be back up eventually. About a month later, the Jersey I'd been offered as a second chance was up, different one, same type, but in much nicer condition. Looked at the earlier bidders history as part of figuring out what I'd bid. Now a month later his bidding pattern looked very normal. Bid a pretty good price and won it for about 30% less than the earlier one went for.
But I still felt a little bad about suspecting him of shilling.
Steve Birmingham Lowell, Massachusetts USA
Message: 16 Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:08:08 -0400 From: "Leonard Diamond" <leonarddiamond@verizon.net> Subject: [CR] ebay shill bidding To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org> Message-ID: <ACF3BEFAE67A4E41BBBCA632CCA5741A@office1> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
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?