Another Run-Up Bid For This Ebay Seller

The reason why the 17 feedback bidder had so many "bids" was because of proxy bidding. That bidder put in their maximum bid over two days before the auction ended. Every time someone else comes in and tries to bid, they are automatically outbid and that counts as a bid.

The winner has over 900 feedback and beat Mr. 17 more than two hours before the auction's end with no other activity. That's not a completely unreasonable price depending on what grade you expect (65 and above).

I see a lot of suggestions of shill bidding, but I think many are due to not equating the timeline and occurrence of bids with the proxy bidding system that ebay uses.

Also, consider this: a collector could have joined ebay to seek out rare and valuable coins for auction and not selling. They don't get feedback for bidding. So someone buying a $1500 coin 17 times is what? That means that if every rare coin they bought was that price, it's over $25k spent on ebay, and there may have been some higher priced items.

Who knows? Maybe GSC has a team of shills, but when looking through their ended auctions, it is not apparent.

If there is a way for someone to abuse a system for profit, they will. Unfortunately.

I'm not so sure that having a large number of actual bids means that "shill" bidding is occurring.

Sometimes, when I put a bid in and am immediately outbid by someone else's max bid, I will bump my bids up by the min bid increment until I just become the high bidder. I'm just trying to figure out what the current max bid is.

Yeah, I know that I can figure it out by putting my max bid and if it outbids the old max bid then I'll know what the old max bid was as well. But, I tend to think that doing it this way can force the bidding higher early in the auction.

As far as GSC is concerned, I've never tried to analyze their sales and have never purchased anything from them. They seem to take good pictures, but somehow their non-slabbed coins just always seemed to be a bit off to me. It's probably just me.

Disabuse yourselves of the idea that GSC needs shill bidders. They don't; they have plenty of dedicated fish on the line as it is. Even if they_do employ shills (I don't believe the case is proven either way), refer to Bobby's point about repeat buyers. People are vendor-loyal. It's how we are. I have a small circle I buy from whenever I can, too.

ebay has made it virtually impossible for ordinary folk like us to view and collect any definitive proof of shill bidding. Only circumstantial evidence, and that proves nothing that can result in any action by ebay.

FREE ADVICE: If you think they are shill bidding, do no buy from them.

GSC doesn't do shows or flea markets, it's strictly online. They have a website, that's it. ebay is pretty much their main sale platform.

I get it, I'm sure I'm underestimating the devoted buyer base. Probably explains 95%+ of sale prices.

It just seems to me there are a very high number of very low feedback bidders. And they have an extremely high number of bids. It's not like GSC is new, I would expect their base of bidders to mostly have lots of feedback by now and less low feedback bidders always so heavily involved with bidding. I guess that could be normal, I don't really know. Does that make sense as to where I'm coming from?

I'm not accusing, I said wonder. That's not completely ridiculous at all. Just because you as a powerseller always play by the rules doesn't mean someone that has been notorious time and time again for juicing photos might also create other advantages for themselves.




Nobody needs shill bidders. It's all about generating even more profits. If there is an opportunity to do that, any business person could decide to consider that if they are unethical. In fact, I would argue that shilling is even more beneficial the bigger the bidder base, there is more exposure, more items, more profits.




Agreed, I can't prove a thing. As long as I'm not violating forum rules, I like to post when I see something really unexpected. If I am violating, I apologize and will stop.

When I first wrote the post, I meant to just mainly focus on the $1500 price tag for the raw 1917-D Lincoln Cent. That is above MS65RD money, which is ridiculous. You could buy a slabbed one for less. I think this is a problem coin, the obverse color is not right. Just amazes me a bidder would bid that high no matter how devoted to the seller they are. Does the devotion have a limit?

Here's another one today:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1917-Linco...AOSw9vlac4At

This is a 1917-P cent going for MS66RB slabbed money! Are you kidding? Their bidders must have endless money.