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If you are a big volume seller, I can believe that you might have some fanatically loyal customers. What do you do if you have a guy who regularly buys a lot of stuff from you and bids in a bunch of auction he does not win, and even retracts a lot of bids in those auctions ...and the guy is not a consignor. I guess you could block him since he might be making you look bad, but if he in fact has bought a bunch of stuff from you on an ongoing basis he could then drop a bunch of negatives on you in retaliation, and you lose his ongoing business
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You are exactly right Al, and once again Larry has shown that he does not know much if anything about shilling. It would be nice to examine the so-called shiller's bid on that item Larry linked, but he has retracted everything, no doubt out of anger, since his bids topped out at $48 (I was watching) and the auction is at $312 with four days to go. Looks like now he'll even have more retractions.
So let's see. The top bidder in Larry's "smoking gun" auction has bid 1% with gregmorris cards, the under-bidder has bid 2% with him, and the third-place bidder has 0% bids with the seller--yes that's right, so few of his total bids that it registers as zero. These three are at present slugging it out with several days to go. Which one or more of these is in the "network" of shillers that seller uses to jack up his prices? Seriously. Oh but wait, some nutty bidder put in twenty something bids on the second day of the auction that topped out at $48.00, then stopped bidding altogether. That's your shiller? That's artificially jacking the price up how? When several others have bid 4, 5, 7X that amount and there are still days left on the auction?
Now if this guy bid $325 and then retracted it just so he could see where the top bid was and then re-bid just under that to max out the "honest" bidder, you might have something. But there's no evidence that this is what happened here or anywhere that I've been shown. In fact, that is the type of thing that could and likely would be called to the seller's attention by those at the top, at which point seller could block that bidder. But for mickey-mouse bidding that tops out at 15 or 20% of the final hammer price, it's doubtful that retractions in that range are noticed by or matter to most people, other than those who apparently feel it their duty to bitch and call people crooks without any substantial proof.
BTW, I just saw where the lowest bidder in Larry's "smoking gun" auction bid 9 times in about 11 seconds, topping out at $5.54. He has tons of retractions. Is he another shill? I mean running the price up to five and half bucks on an item that will sell for a few hundred dollars is dastardly and must be the work of some gregmorris henchman, right?