Originally Posted by
Blue Order
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.
Well, that's what we're talking about, or at least what I thought we were talking about
: a real bidder who has paid more than he should have as a result of shill bidding. If a bidder is working with a seller to inflate the selling price, that's shill bidding; that's not just against eBay's terms of service, that's illegal. It doesn't matter when the shill bidder entered that phony bid, it's still illegal. In the case of the guy who snookered me, the FBI got him on felony wire fraud for the shill bidding, and then mail fraud, also a felony, when he sent that item through the mail. The only reason he avoided jail time was because he agreed to testify against the others in the ring.