Much like bribery though, isn't it. It only works when the other party accepts the bribe.

Not really, offering to buy someone out, and them accepting, is legal.

Sorry if the point wasn't clear. Let me try to make it simpler.

Bribery only works when the party that is offered the bribe accepts.
Buying another company only works when the company that is offered the buyout accepts.

Does that help?

No need, I got the gist of what you were implying and merely sought to remind others that your commentary was a bit misaligned. If you would actually look up the correct legal definition of the word "bribery" you'd see that it pertains to the offering, giving, receiving or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official, or other person, in charge of a public or legal duty.

The word/term also usually carries with it an illegal, or at least negative, connotation, which I assumed you were trying to imply in some way to Ebay's actions in regards to their acquisitions of other companies over the years. Otherwise, why use the specific word/term "bribery"? Regardless of what Ebay's motive's may have been for any of their business acquisitions, not a single one of them involved giving anything of value to an individual or person in an attempt to influence anyone's actions in regards to any public or legal duties. A business is not actually an individual or person, so by definition, you can't actually bribe a company/business. In the way you are attempting to apply the word/term "bribery", it is akin to someone posting on the B/S/T forum that they are looking for something in particular, and someone responds they have what that person is looking for, they negotiate and arrive at an agreed upon value/price, payment in whatever agreed upon form takes place, and the item's ownership and possession passes from the seller to the buyer. Which is basically the same steps and things that happen when one company buys another. Except, I don't ever remember in all my years anyone ever saying or referring to any seller from off the B/S/T, just like in my example, as having been bribed!!! I believe the average person would simply refer to that as "doing business".

Now, does that help you?

What is actually absurd is that you just posted the above. If ya want to play devil’s advocate or challenge groupthink, ya might want to start posting actual facts and accurate statements. When you don’t…and you don’t…it is not really contributing to an honest debate. The closer I read you the more I see you don’t always really know what you are talking about. Not sure why more do not call you out, honestly.

Anyway your conclusion that ‘the crowd always pointed to the fact that PWCC got higher prices for their cards than other eBay sellers’ was a basis for their determining shill bidding at PWCC is as spot on as you asserting eBay was materially impacted by their banning PWCC. The crowd does not have access to eBay bidder records but even without those there were countless times it was demonstrated shill bidding occurred.

Plus (as has already been pointed out) there is a publicly posted text message interchange in which Brent himself instructs his "minion" to place the shill bid. I don't have time to find it, but it's been well publicized. Perhaps Snowman conveniently forgot about that minor detail?

I am the last guy on earth to defend Brent, but I actually think that particular text message in context is not that damning.

Well maybe not, to an accomplished attorney. I'm sure his words could be twisted and interpreted in similar fashion to Bill Clinton trying to define the word "is". But to the average collector schmuck like me, it looked awfully bad. I personally did not see much of a grey area.

It's not that nuanced. Courtney was string bidding on a card but had stopped one level below taking the lead; the card was still well below market value as I recall. Brent said just take the lead for now it's a bad look when you string bid but stop short. Given where the bidding was, I didn't see it as trying to run the card up. That said, I would guess Courtney had lots of stuff that was much more damning.

Then you would have totally assumed incorrectly. I was not implying that, though you may have inferred it.

My point was made in reference to a SELLER selling the company. Ebay cannot acquire all these companies if the seller doesn't want to sell. It's not totally on ebay that they were able to buy up all these other companies (assuming no other nefarious leveraging going on). The ebay post seemed to be a 'piling on' post from a previous number of posts about 'big companies' and how they act. You are correct though in the difference being that an 'attempt to purchase' is not illegal where an attempt to bribe is.

Just trying, like others have stated, to be a bit 'objective'. :cool:

I think Taylor's point is simply that eBay's purported strategy takes two to tango. The analogy to bribery probably wasn't the best one because it's so loaded.

Correct. And better said. Thanks!

Feel free to respond to anything I say that you believe is not factual or an accurate statement. I have no interest in spreading non-truths and always welcome being corrected.

I don't know what your point is here. However, all three statements are true.

• "The crowd" does constantly point to the fact that PWCC & Probstein get higher prices for their cards as the basis for their claims about both shilling their own auctions.

• eBay was materially impacted by their banning PWCC

• The crowd does not have access to eBay bidder records but even without those there were countless times it was demonstrated shill bidding occurred.

That said, and for some reason I feel like a broken record with the constant need to point out the obvious here, but there is a massive difference between demonstrating that shill bidding occurred and demonstrating that the consignment company itself is the one doing the shill bidding. Similarly, and perhaps also worth repeating, there is a massive difference between saying "PWCC shilled their own auctions" and "individuals associated with PWCC shilled their auctions".

There's a third category -- the auction house knew consignors were bidding up their own items, allowed it, and perhaps even facilitated it by cancelling sales if they won.

To be clear, my point about eBay repeatedly acquiring smaller auction sites over the years wasn't to imply that they were doing something illegal or even shady by doing that. I have no reason to believe that any of these acquisitions weren't above board, and I think most were probably fairly savvy business decisions by eBay. I was mainly just pointing out the fact that it is evidence that eBay very much does take seriously their competition, even if that competitor is small relative to eBay. I am arguing that regardless of why eBay sent out that email, they definitely view/ed PWCC as a threat, and there is no shortage of very public examples of eBay attempting to minimize threats to their business, regardless of how small you think those threats might be (and PWCC is a much larger threat than many of the companies they've acquired or sought to acquire over the years). This in itself, of course, is not proof that they sent out that email for the sole intent of damaging PWCC's brand. However, I am simply pointing out that eBay has certainly established a precedent for this to be quite plausible.

Taylor,

As Peter already said, it takes two to tango, and I 100% agree. That's why I was a bit perplexed when you made the bribery comparison. That wording, with the negative and illegal bribery connotations, goes opposite to the point I thought you were trying to make. It puts Ebay right back in everyone's crosshairs as the bad guys, now for bribing people on top of everything else they already were disliked for. I'm actually with you, just concerned you made your point a little awkwardly. All good. :)

Ok, they cut their nose to spite their face.


"Since PWCC was going to open a marketplace, we risked libel and kicked them off our platform"

I aint buying it

"The crowd" does constantly point to the fact that PWCC & Probstein get higher prices for their cards as the basis for their claims about both shilling their own auctions. Which is it...constantly or always and whenever, as your initial post stated? Either way, so every time an accusation of shill bidding has been made by the crowd it always/constantly pointed to high prices as the reason? You need to read all the threads again. Neither constantly nor always are accurate on the frequency of the crowd using higher prices as the proof of shill bids.

eBay was materially impacted by their banning PWCC Define material because based on ebay's gross sales revenue of more than 10 billion, 7.5 million in fees paid by PWCC (which is significantly higher number than they paid) would not meet the definition of materiality.

That said, and for some reason I feel like a broken record with the constant need to point out the obvious here, but there is a massive difference between demonstrating that shill bidding occurred and demonstrating that the consignment company itself is the one doing the shill bidding. Similarly, and perhaps also worth repeating, there is a massive difference between saying "PWCC shilled their own auctions" and "individuals associated with PWCC shilled their auctions" I understand your distinguishing between the two but in my view if the company does not take steps to discourage shill bidding by consignors then they are almost as guilty as if the company engages in shill bidding itself. If PWCC knew several consignors were suspected of it, why keep taking their consignments? Further I am pretty confident the FBI and eBay can demonstrate shill bidding within the company. Not sure it would be that difficult to prove.

In the days before Brent blocked bid histories, and even more so when some of us knew who some of the bidders were, it was a lot more than prices realized that drove suspicion: massive string bidding, massive early bidding, people bidding on widely disparate cards that it seemed unlikely the same collector would collect, known market pushers even by Brent's admission bidding heavily, and perhaps above all tolerance of huge numbers of retractions. There were other anomalies too in the bidding sometimes that just looked bad. Could someone bound and determined to defend Brent offer a competing explanation in some cases? Sure. But overall, it was not a good look, at all.

Remember when Brent claimed on this board that he was one of the power sellers that was going to fix shill bidding on ebay's platform? Those were the days.

There is very little he won't say if he thinks it makes him look good.

Such groupthink here. Consider other explanations that exonerate PWCC for a change.

I just don't understand how you guys see this as PWCC's (or insert any consignment company here) responsibility though. They don't have access to the data. This is ebay's platform, ebay's data, and ebay's responsibility. Are you really expecting consignment companies to crawl through all of their listings and webscrape user ID data (which is against ebay's TOS) and bid history and follow who bids on what, and try to track people down? You think they should have their own internal BODA team? Do you really not realize how ridiculous these expectations are in practice? I'll repeat: they don't have access to the database where all of this information is stored! Only eBay does. How does this point never land with you guys?

PWCC forces you to enter your eBay user ID on your vault account, and they send you a stern warning email if that account ID bids on one of its own listings, and then they will ban you if you do it again. This is more than any other consignment company does, as far as I'm aware. They also block all non paying bidders. And even then, they are limited to just 5,000 user IDs. What more can they do?

Small Traditions?
 

Is anything in this thread about Small Traditions? Oh look, squirrel...

Maybe this will help...

https://luckeycards.com/courtney.png

Because it is a nonsensical point.

You know who also doesn't have access to eBay's databases? Everyone else. Including laymen who can, based on publicly available information, easily point to circumstances that strongly indicate illegitimate (and likely illegal) bidding behavior. And guess what? While those laymen only have access to anonymized bidder IDs, PWCC has access to the full bidder ID. And, if PWCC is as important to eBay as you like to tell us ad nauseum that they are, then they are one phone call away from knowing the bidders name and address that can be checked against the consigner's.

What percentage of PWCC's sales are associated with the vault?

Let's review three random facts:

1. There is strong (albeit potentially circumstantial evidence) that illegitimate bidding behavior driving up realized prices on PWCC auctions.
2. PWCC apparently doesn't have an audit function to review sales for said illegitimate behavior.
3. PWCC bans non-paying bidders.

These three random facts have a common thread between them. Can you determine what that is?

As I've pointed out many times when I see idiocy like PWCC can't possibly monitor its own business, it takes a few minutes at most to sort your auctions by highest bid price and look through a given number for unusual activity.

Incidentally Brent was keenly aware of who was bidding at least on his big ticket cards. When we were on speaking terms he always knew who varous masked IDs were, and would also know who various serial retractors were.

People are victims of their own ignorance and or laziness. All kinda of information is out their on PWCC. You can chose what you believe and what you don’t believe what you bid/but what you don’t it’s ok either way. Either way I think it’s cool to see how people think 🤔

People are victims of their own ignorance and or laziness. All kinda of information is out their on PWCC. You can chose what you believe and what you don’t believe what you bid/buy on along with what you don’t, it’s ok either way. Either way I think it’s cool to see how people think 🤔

With all due respect, I've read this screen shot dozens of times. It's a nothing burger as even Peter above acknowledged. This is not a communication where Brent is trying to get someone to shill their auction. This is him reprimanding Courtney for string bidding and not taking the high bid during the stages of an auction where the bids don't even matter anyhow.

I wish people would stop bringing up that text message lol because it really doesn't help the case against Brent.

Clearly, you guys don't understand the scale of what you are asking them to do or what it would take for them to "monitor their business" as you put it.

It's one thing to have an entire internet forum of free crowd-sourced resources with endless time on their hands and nothing better to do than clicking through random eBay listings in an effort to find someone who *might* be shill bidding their auctions. But it's something else entirely for a consignment company to be expected to hire a team to crawl through over 10,000 listings per week, mapping out eBay user IDs and cross-checking them to see which users might be shilling their consignments. This is an absolutely ridiculous expectation. Do you have any idea how much this would cost? Do you know how much it would cost just to set up and maintain a database alone to handle this, let alone the manpower? They've sold well in excess of a million eBay listings lol. Perhaps you don't realize that clicking on a 'bid history' link that shows eBay user IDs is not "access to the data". There's a huge difference between clicking links and seeing names and having the access to the data required to monitor something like this at scale and to be able to write code that enables you to intervene when necessary. When I say "they don't have access to the data", clearly this point has not landed with you guys. You clearly are not data people. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about here. You couldn't possibly have ever spent a day in your life in the tech industry if you actually expect them to do this. Meanwhile, this is an easy problem for eBay to solve. They already have the database set up with all the relevant data at their fingertips and the resources (data analysts & data scientists) to do it, not to mention the responsibility to do this. And let's not forget, they also already claim to do this on their website (even though they clearly do a shit job of it).

I have personally written fraud detection algorithms and have coded out large-scale projects just like this for my previous employer (a large insurance company). I know what it would take to accomplish what you guys are proposing. This is a huge undertaking. It's not just asking Billy and Sally to spot-check a few listings over their lunch break.

This is perhaps the single most ignorant post I've ever seen you make. You are miles out of your element here Peter. This is tantamount to me telling you how easy it should be to litigate one of your cases despite me never having spent even 5 minutes of my life in a law office.

I did it myself frequently, sort his auctions by price that is and look through the bidding on 10 or 20. It took no time at all. How arrogant of me.

This sort of sample was more than enough to identify certain types of recurring issues on expensive cards. You're missing the forest for the trees. You're also missing the human element, he knew who was doing what, and I base that on conversations as well as observation.

It's you who is out of your element, playing contrarian for some undisclosed purpose.

Just to lighten up things here, I would seek others' opinions about PWCC's vault situation. How many cards have fled since their bad news broke? Of those that fled how many have already been consigned to auction houses, such as REA and Goldin who have actively solicited them? Or how many cards are back in the arms of their loving owners who are waiting for the dust to settle? Or how many cards have stayed in the vault and will make an appearance in PWCC's first independent auction? Much pondering.

Actually, we do. It is called internal auditing and virtually all major corporations have a department dedicated to it.

But PWCC is sooooooooooooooo huge and vast and sprawling they couldn't possibly do it.

I guess I'll just keep repeating myself then.

They don't have access to the data behind the listings! Only eBay does. This is eBay's problem to solve. Not theirs.

I just double-checked for you. Looks like they still don't have access to the data behind the listings!.

Your proposal to sort through the top 10-20 listings does nothing to solve this problem. That's 10 grains of sand on an entire beach. And they already ban those users if they don't pay or if they bid from their known eBay accounts. You don't know what you're talking about here.

Actually it's not 20 grains of sand at all, because the bigger cards are where most of the problems were. But you seem incapable of understanding that. Also with all PWCC's employees they could have sorted through many more than 20 without much of a time commitment.

Here you go with your conspiracy theories again and my "undisclosed purpose". :rolleyes:

I assure you I am not the one who is out of his element here. I'm a data scientist. You're a lawyer. This is a data problem that requires data solutions.

No, it requires judgment and common sense more than anything, you're wrong again.

They've sold millions of cards Peter.

Oh, and in case you've somehow forgotten. They still don't have access to the data behind the listings!

And data! Perhaps you forgot about that part.

Most fraud cases do not require data scientists to prove, sorry.

Nor will this one, should it happen.

Let me help you out a bit here. There is more (way more) to the functioning of a company than database analyses and program algorithms. I have no doubt that you can speak authoritatively on those topics. But, you need to understand that even a marginally competent accountant can suss out anomalous transactions in their sleep. Anyone with advanced training in corporate auditing would be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. The fact that you cannot grok this isn't the proof that you think it is. It isn't proof at all.

Of course, individual cases of fraud can often be discovered without the need for a data scientist or someone with similar data skills.

But that's not what we're talking about here. You don't get to move the goalposts. We're talking about preventing fraud at the enterprise level. Eliminating, or at least significantly reducing, to whatever extent possible, the problem of shill bidding. Not just catching a few bad actors here and there. If all they did was implement your "solution", nothing would change. You guys would still latch on to the other 99% of the people doing this and still say PWCC isn't clamping down on shill bidding. And those same bad actors would just pop up a new eBay account and do it again anyhow. They need access to a database of these users and their activity. They need bid history data and IP addresses in addition to numerous other relevant fields of data. Any solution to this problem worth its salt is an enterprise-level solution that definitely requires the skills that a data scientist possesses. But it sounds like you've got it solved. Perhaps you could sell your "solution" to eBay? I bet they'd love to hear you pitch. :rolleyes:

It's funny that people keep posting that PM between Brent and Courtney where Courtney says, "I'm not doing anything 10m other people don't do." While the number probably isn't 10 million people in just this hobby, his point is still valid. This is a massive scale problem and there are millions of eBay users engaged in this sort of activity daily. You're not even going to make a dent by spot-checking listings one by one. This is just a remarkably inefficient and ignorant solution to much, much larger problem.

You're moving the goalposts now and or making a straw man point. I never claimed my method would catch or stop all shill bidding. I only claimed, and stand by it, that it was enough to spot serious repeated anomalies in PWCC auctions that to me were strongly suggestive of impropriety. And, had PWCC taken the time to do the same, would have alerted them, if indeed their claim is they were unaware.

As Dylan sang, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Am aware of and have seen this screen shot before, and regardless of the specific content, does anyone find it the least bit disconcerting that the owner of an AH/consignment company would be actively communicating with bidders like this during live auctions of items being sold by their company? Just off the top of my head, I know we have various members on here who also operate/own AH/consignment companies. Would be very interested to hear their takes on this and if they would (or have) ever have communicated with bidders during one of their ongoing auctions like this.

And in regards to people posting that an AH/consignment company doesn't have the time or ability to watch and monitor their auctions for suspicious and potential shill bidding activity, how then would the actual owner of the AH/consignment company ever have time to engage in communications such as this one? Clearly from the content of the messages it would seem that there had been some prior ongoing communications to what we see posted. So again, if this owner has the time to be aware of this one particular auction and the potential suspicious bidding activity in it, they would most certainly seem to have time to watch and pay attention to other auctions of theirs for suspicious shill bidding activities as well.

Again, I completely agree. Anyone with training in auditing (or even my 10 year old nephew with a few hours of training) could suss out anomalous eBay transactions.

I'm arguing that you don't understand the scope of this problem and the manpower and skills it would take to solve it at a scale that would yield the end results we all want. I'm saying the solutions you guys are proposing are insufficient. Even if PWCC spent tens of thousands of man-hours going through their listings one-by-one and added all suspicious bidders to their blocked bidders list they still wouldn't solve the problem. Most would just bid from a different account the following day. But even if that all did work, they still wouldn't be able to block the vast majority anyhow as they'd still be limited to blocking a mere 5,000 users as discussed previously (which is a small fraction of the number they'd need to block).

As you say, it isn't all that hard to find one suspicious transaction. What someone is not seeing here is what happens when you start to pull on that string. Maybe nothing. But, maybe the whole sweater comes unraveled.

What I think has gotten lost here is that the counter argument is an exercise in question begging. Despite the fact that the argument that "there are two many transactions to audit" is patently false, it presupposes that there is a will to prevent shill bidding.

In that vein, on a number of occasions I pointed out to Brent serial retractors that were bidding in his auctions. Despite his announced policy of zero tolerance above a certain number of retractions, he (or Betsy) more often than not made excuses for the individual but did not ban them.

I understand that is what your argument is. But, again, it is nonsensical. You don't need to inspect every transaction. Auditing shares a simple concept with quality control and a number of other business functions: sampling plans. You will end up finding suspicious transactions, and to reuse the simile, those transactions are a loose thread to be pulled.

Guess it's time for this...

416. Besmirchants
The oft-mentioned, high profile card peddlers that every single one of us knows deserve every last bit of crap that gets thrown at them.

See also: Ignoraphobia - the righteousness keeping good people from ever spending a dime with these filthy dealers.

See also: Snubmariner - a person whose eBay searches use the “Exclude” feature to simply cruise by all of those sellers’ offerings.

See also: Appease Artist - someone who has no problem purchasing cards from these guys.

Snowman is an army of one in these debates. I think people give him (and his contrarianism) too much oxygen.

I plead guilty to that. DNFTT as they say.

It doesn't help because people are focusing on the wrong thing. It's not that he told him he would be outbid (I could certainly say that about lots in my auction, especially fairly early on, without feeling like I was risking impropriety) it's the fact that Courtney WAS THE CONSIGNOR OF THE ITEM IN QUESTION. Or has age dulled my memory and he wasn't, in which case why does Brent care how he bids?

Brent cared because, as the text itself notes, people were bitching to him about the string bidder bidding only up to the point of the high bidder's max bid but not taking over the lead.

If Courtney was the consignor I don't remember that.

I thought he bought the card from Brent at a National, discovered it was cleaned and Brent offered to sell it for him to get him his money back. Again maybe memory doesn't serve me correctly, and I hate to have to wade through all that old crap again. That's worse than trying to spot shill bidders in one of my auctions...

I thought he sold it through Goldin and that John Perez bought it and was the consignor of the auction in question. Could be wrong but fairly sure.

Well, if he wasn't the consignor then it's not the best conversation to be having, but materially it's pretty much a nothing-burger to me.

Agree and every time it gets trotted out as Exhibit A it's just tossing a softball down the middle to the defenders.

This is certainly true. And yet for some reason, I can't seem to stop outputting the CO2.

I don't see how this entire sweater unraveling could possibly happen though simply from "pulling a few threads". Moreover, I would argue that pulling out a few threads not only fails to unravel the sweater but those threads will just be replaced by more threads the following day when 'bannedBidder123' comes back as 'bannedBidder1234'.

Let's just pretend for a moment that PWCC (or Probstein or whoever) hires an internal BODA-like team of researchers to hunt down these bad actors full-time. And let's just pretend for a moment that the labor is entirely free so that they don't have to raise their prices and can still compete in this market. Perhaps they can hire a crew of college interns whose lifelong dream is to save the hobby. Let's say they succeed in compiling a list of all the eBay usernames who certainly, or at least very likely, shill bid on their consignments (or the consignments of others and they were just trying to pump cards with no intention to pay if they win). So now they have this master list of 100,000+ eBay IDs. What next? They've already added as many of these people as they can to their blocked bidders list (5,000) and they already ban them internally from consigning with them again in the future. What next? Even if they succeed, those same people just consign with the next company and do it again. And even if they get reported enough to where eBay bans that account, 'iShillCards2' just pops up again as 'iShillCards3'. The juice here isn't even worth the squeeze when the squeeze is free. But, of course, in reality it's not free. It would be extremely expensive to hire a team to do this. And for what? The end result is the same unless eBay itself decides to take drastic measures to address this problem at the ground level. They need structural changes in place to combat this and they need to care about the problem first in order for it to go away. To place these expectations & responsibilities on the shoulders of the sellers is a prime example of missing the forest for the trees.

At this point, I think its is clearly established that you aren't able to conceptualize anything except through the prism of your experiences as a programmer. You can continue to construct all the hypotheticals and what-ifs you want to explain why you think such a thing is impossible. But, it is inescapably true that tens of thousands of companies do it everyday as part of the normal course of business. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is unremarkable as things go.

You fancy yourself as some kind of devil's advocate pointing out the logical fallacies in everyone else's arguments. Yet, you seem to accept the PWCC story line with complete incredulity. Forgive me if this cuts too deeply, but I would remind you of what Feynman said:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

And, with that, not only have we strayed from Small Traditions, we have strayed from even talking about cards. So, since every thread needs a card, but I am not a pre-war collector, here is an Obak I do have in my collection.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vzxMkrowR...0/2010O_AD.jpg

Ah yes, the old, "Snowman is too stupid to comprehend this" argument. The bottom line is that there is only one person in this thread who actually knows what they are talking about. There is only one person in this discussion who is not only capable of providing a solution to the problem of how to identify and eliminate fraud of this scale, but who also has direct experience solving such problems. I was hired to build precisely this sort of solution for a major insurance company here in CA several years back, and built out a fraud detection algorithm/predictive model that resulted in capturing and prosecuting widespread industry fraud. I've also been contacted numerous times by eBay's recruiters to join their team to do what sounded like similar work from the emails. However, I have no interest in working at eBay so I didn't respond. You guys can sit here and pretend like you know what you're talking about, but you don't. Sorting through the top 10 to 20 (or even hundreds) of listings randomly clicking around like a buffoon, writing user names down in your little notepad with no access to their user ID history or IP addresses and turning over your cute little list to the eBay police is not going to solve this problem. If this was PWCC's own platform, then yes, of course it would be their problem to solve. But it's not their platform. It's eBay's platform and eBay is the only entity with the resources necessary and available to solve it. All of these "solutions" you guys keep coming up with are tantamount to trying to cut down a redwood tree with a pocket knife.

LOL but I am the arrogant one. What a piece of work you are. And it's all a straw man, I never proposed a solution to all the fraud on ebay, so you are attacking something that never was offered for that purpose. Buffoon indeed. Maybe a little reading comprehension would be in order for you. And how long before your massive ego problem causes you to self-destruct here as it did on BO?

Yet with all your wisdom and humility, you still somehow cannot seem to grasp the simple fact that eBay is the only entity that houses the keys to the door you wish to unlock.

You honestly think that PWCC could and should just hire a team of BODA-like researchers to go on an eBay bidder hunting spree, clicking away at random links (sorry, 'sorted' links, perhaps just the top 10 or 20 ought to do) and suddenly all is well in shill bidding land. Perhaps Brent himself could get this all done over a coffee break or two?

I've pointed out numerous very specific problems to every solution you guys have put forward here. None of you have addressed a single one of them. I have pointed out the scale of how many auctions they're doing (over 10,000 listings per month, and millions in total). I have asked what you propose they should do even if they could find a way to compile this magic list of 100,000+ naughty eBay userIDs for free. Again, you provided no answers. I asked how much manpower you thought it would take to research and address this problem. Again, crickets. You're not here for an honest conversation or dialogue. You're just here to sling mud. At PWCC, at Probstein, at me. You have no interest in listening to someone with real-world experience in what it actually takes to solve a problem like this. Nope. You're the expert!

"Just sort by the top 10 to 20 listings and look at the bid histories. You don't need a data scientist for that."
- Peter S., September, 2021

You're completely missing my point -- you just keep mischaracterizing it and making it much bigger than it is in order to knock it down -- so I'll give up. I haven't said a word about Probstein, by the way, so stop falsely accusing me.

OK, so since you think I'm mischaracterizing it, please explain it as you see it then. I'll be civil. I'm honestly open to other solutions if you have one to propose. Here are some questions that I think we can probably agree would be important to ask when considering any solutions one might put forward.

1. What, specifically, is the shill bidding problem that you think PWCC should be responsible for preventing?
2. What do you think the scale of that problem is?
3. How do you think PWCC can solve this problem?
4. How much do you think your proposed solution would cost to implement?
5. How effective do you believe your solution would be with respect to the percentage of reduction in shilled listings?

I never said that.

I will say this though: you are ignorant. You are ignorant in the same way we are all ignorant: outside our areas of expertise there is a vast world we know very little about and have to rely on other experts to navigate successfully. I am sure, within your area of specialty, you are every bit as brilliant as you have told us you are.

I know several accountants just at my current employer that I could turn loose on a huge dataset and within a week they would be back with a long list of anomalous transactions and a fully fleshed out audit plan to keep themselves busy for months on end. The fact that you are incapable of understanding that this is possible is not evidence that it is impossible. Failure of imagination is not an argument.

FWIW, the only T206 I own, a trimmed Frank Delehanty.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b_oaHVBKg...elehanty_F.jpg

Oof. I don't even know where to begin with this one. So I guess I'll just leave it be. You guys just have no idea what you're talking about. Accountants? Keeping themselves busy for months on end? lol.

1983 called. They want their "solution" back.

I find it disturbing Brent knew Courney's bidding ID, among the "millions" of Ebay bidders. Also had his cell phone # to communicate outside Ebay. It would not take more than a dozen or so "courtneys" to skew hundreds of sales. Say 2 dozen, and there is a new marketplace...see what I did there

scandal
 

now leaning towards snowman

PWCC Thrived for YEARS on Marketing, Ignorance, Laziness, and FOMO.

Let's see how they do now off Ebay in a overbought marketplace. Will be interesting to see. I think once their own platform auction starts they will do blowout record numbers....they kinda have to don't they?

That alone doesn't bother me, someone wins an auction of yours once and you know who he is, and Courtney was a frequent bidder and probably frequent winner. Probably a consignor too. Why wouldn't Brent know a major customer's ID?

But look at Brent's own posts from 2016, he knew who the guys were -- and it was 12-20 as best I can tell -- who were as he put it pushing the market.

So were many others of the shillers, I mean buyers group!

Right, I am only saying knowing his ID was not in and of itself suspicious.

First, you're defending Brent telling someone to shill bid on their items, now you're defending him knowing who his customers are and having their contact info? Sure seems like you have an "undisclosed purpose" participating in this discussion.