Originally Posted by gridplan

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.