[nolemmings]

It appears to me that you don't know what a duck looks like. There were four tatoos that went for high prices. The guy who won the Killebrew didn't even bid on the other three--at all--so your statement that the 3 top bidders on these high-priced tats were all the same guys is false. As for the other three tats, they were the subject of high snipes placed by two guys, one of whom has a bid history of 9% with this seller-- hardly a guy who makes "virtually all" of his bids with him, so you're wrong again. He won one of the three. The other guy has a high bidding history of 73% with this seller, but he's only bid on 26 items total this past month. Four are on these tatoos and I would bet if you search the history on all the other tats he bid on several of them as well, because, geez I don't know, maybe he collects them and there was a set break?

The most important point is that the bidding by these guys were all snipes placed in the final few seconds of the auction. They did not bid before then. The whole purpose of shilling is to artificially pump up the price in hopes that some mark will keep bidding it up further. You can't do that very well now can you if you are bidding with 4-8 seconds to go--you give the sucker almost no time to see your bid and raise it. What, you hope that some guy who has not even shown up will bid in the few seconds remaining and that he will just happen to outbid you, or else you get stuck with an item you don't really want? Really? And the tatoos, which are mainly selling in the single digits but with some nicer looking commons hitting $50, are gonna motivate some shiller to throw out a $189 snipe for Norm Siebern because he's confident some sucker is going to outbid him in the last couple of seconds? Sure, that's what happened.