So I won this auction last night:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/144432302843It was at $16 and I put in a bid for $30 with 5 seconds left. In the last couple of seconds, it got bid all the way up to my max. Not a big deal at face value, it happens. He also has this listing for 5 more, so I've been following it as well:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/384753650581After winning the first lot, I started noticing some weird "coincidences" when I was looking at the current bids on the second lot:
(1) On the first listing, the two accounts that bid it up in the last couple of seconds are accounts that have what seems to be unusually high bidding activity with the seller. One has 144 feedback and 97% bids with this seller on 1175 bids on 589 items in the last 30 days. That's a lot of losing. The other has 3 feedback and 100% bids with the same seller over 145 bids on 144 items.
(2) On the second listing, the guy with 144 feedback has already bid on it.
(3) From the first listing, it seems like the bidder with the higher feedback is putting in more frequent bids with smaller increments, while once the auction got close to ending, the lower feedback bidder put in a higher bid to see where it was at. Once it was apparent that I was still high bidder, the more frequent bidder pushed it up in the last couple of seconds.
(4) If you look at the 30 day bid history for those two accounts, they're bidding around the same times. Not just that, but on a similarly wide range of items. Lots of people collect different things, but usually it seems like if someone is giving such a high percentage of their bids to one seller, it's because that seller sells a lot of something specific that the buyer likes. I have a couple sellers that I buy from frequently. But these two accounts are putting in bids on a ton of different items, only with this one seller. There's no consistency in what they're bidding on. They're both just hopping around between random items and losing one after another. They're not just fans of imperial Roman or
Seated halves that only this guy sells. You can get modern proof sets from all these different countries from anywhere, why only bid on them from one seller?
Am I being paranoid or does it seem strange that two bidders are putting in a ton of losing bids on a wide variety of items, all with only the same one seller? If I was constantly losing auctions on a wide variety of common items from the same seller, I think I'd try my hand elsewhere. Not these two.
It seems like shill bidding to me. I'm going to watch that second auction and see if it turns out similar to this first one.
What do you think?
Posted 03/04/2022 09:04 am
