Some interesting bidding last night
 

Not accusing anyone of anything. But these results and bids really make me scratch my head.

Between 6:46 p.m. and 7:03 p.m. (PDT) last night, all sold by Probstein:

'53 Topps #220 Satchell Paige PSA 3
Ended at $765. Previous 3's have been in the $300 - $400 range or so.
Two bidders went crazy in the closing seconds. Feedbacks of 1064 and 943


'56 Topps #33 Roberto Clemente PSA 4
Ended at $655. Previous 4's have been in the $250-300 range. Two bidders went crazy in the closing seconds. Guess who? 1064 and 943. Bid increments are $10 at those bidding levels....and 1064 beat 943 by $7.


'59 Topps #10 Mickey Mantle PSA 4
Ended at $855. Previous 4's have been in the $350-400 range. Two bidders went crazy in the closing seconds. Guess who? 1064 and 943. Same story with bid increments. At the last second, both bidders decided to put in a bid at more than 2x typical sell prices for this card...and those bids were coincidentally within $4 of one another.


Another '56 Clemente PSA 4
This time it sells for $712. Previous sells of $250-300. Guess who? Our friends 1064 and 943 again.


Last up is a '59 Mantle PSA 3 that sold for $631
Recent 3's are in the $300 range. And you'll never guess what happened. At the last minute, 1064 and 943 bid over 2x previous sells of this card (and bid within a few dollars of each other).

That was all I could find after about 5 minutes of searching. There's probably more that could easily be found. I also see coincidentally that overpriced BIN's of the Paige and Clemente in the same grade have sold since these auctions closed.

Here's another.

The last few '55 bowman psa 4 mantles have sold for $5-600. Last night the same bidders pushed this one up over $1k and bid within $8 of each other.

It's Probstin so it's not surprising in the slightest. This is the same person who took zero issue with selling trimmed/altered cards and responded with the argument of "It's in a slab so It's not my problem." I suspect he has people shill bidding on some of his cards.

I don't necessarily assume that he has folks shilling. But I find it hard to dispute that the two bidders were in it together. And i wonder if those particular auctions will be paid for.

I think we can reliably assume it at this point. There's been so many threads about it on the Blowout forums. There's even some older threads about it on Collectors Universe. All I'm saying is if they've committed one shady business practice in the past, what's to stop them from doing something else?

Seems to me someone was trying to sabotage the auctions. Not sure how this helps Probstein, these were bogus bids.

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Even in the past hour, those 2 bidders are bidding on 10 of the same auctions, between Baseball and basketball. Must have deep pockets.

And some.depth to their collecting! Must be the eyeballs on certain sellers and confidence in shipping

1064 has 100% bidding activity with that seller, but the other one only has 37%. That alone does not mean it is shady, but it does not look good if other questionable things are happening. It COULD appear that 1064 was shilling up a legit bidder in 943.

In the name of privacy?, ebay removing everyone's ability to see who the bidders are years ago is not helping to easily shine the light on bad bidding practices.

Sometimes you stumble upon it, other times you can make an easy case. I stumbled upon a shiller not that long ago after they tried to offer me the item I had just lost, claiming the buyer backed out. Oddly enough, that same card had sold 3 times previously with that same bidder winning it. Talk about being stupid when you try to rip people off!