Originally Posted by
gridplan
Sniping and shill bidding are unrelated. If a bidder colludes with a seller to drive up the price of the item, that's shill bidding, which is a form of wire fraud. It doesn't matter if the bid was placed in the first minute of the auction or the last.
But the shill bidder still has to have a real bidder to bid against. If nobody used the proxy bid, and nobody got sucked into those pointless bidding wars, shills would have nobody to bid against. At best, they'd put in a proxy bid which would function as a de facto reserve price.
Of course, noobs will still get sucked into bidding wars, and slightly more experienced noobs will still make proxy bids, so shilling will continue to work.
Me, I just figure out what the bike will sell for, and what I'm willing to pay for it, and make my snipe just before the auction closes. I've been pretty successful at getting something if I want it.