73 bids in 45 minutes

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Posted By: jay behrens 

Just got an email back form eBay, and surprise of surprises, they said there is no evidence of shill bidding. Imagine that. A Powerseller with 7k feedback being let go scott free.

I can't wait until the wrong person gets seriously burned by a Powerseller and they sue eBay for not doing anything about their Powersellers. I'm not a fan of suing for the sake of suing, but sadly, That's about the only way that you can get a major corps attention and get them to chamge things.

Jay

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Posted By: TBob

someone here will badmouth the lawyer of the guy suing ebay.

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Posted By: runscott

Such paragons of virtue as Bill Clinton were also lawyers from Arkansas!

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Posted By: Lee Behrens

The thing that sucks is that if ebay is sued and losses all they will do is like the tobacco companies, pass the cost on to the users, higher fees. So we loss both ways.

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

After reading the original thread on the forum for this Baseball cigar label auction, and after reviewing the bid history, etc. I threw my hat in the ring and on 5/8, I also filed a report with ebay.

Reported user: franksauct@aol.com !44463! 122497

Item number(s): 3606879646

Related user IDs: mcshyd
autonbusti

Customer concern: Believe that the seller, franksauct@aol.com may be engaged in shill bidding on auction 3606879646, Crack Team Baseball Game Cig. Box Label, Seller has received 73 bids from the same two UserID's. Both User ID's mcshyd and autobusti have 0 feedbacks and have placed each of their combined 73 bids on an average of 40-45 minutes apart. Cannot say for an absolute certainty that there is shill bidding involved, but given the facts it does seem possible.

Thanks,
Adam J. Baxter

I strongly support a fair bidding and selling atmosphere on ebay and I feel that bringing questionable auctions to the attention of everyone is important in an effort to weed out the folks who are damaging the hobby. The fact that this guy, franksauct@aol.com had two zero feedback bidders, (mcshyd and autonbusti),bidding over 70 times combined in a evidently evenly spaced manner to bring the price of this item over four hundred dollars, was too fishy to be ignored. Ebay recieved my report, however the only update I've gotten to date was an email to take a survey about the service I received when filing the report, (?).

An opinion regarding Powersellers: I have noticed a remarkable descrepency ,(sic), between regular ebay members and powersellers. Not every powerseller is bad, but ebay does seem to cater to powersellers more so then other members, especially in disputes. Of course, when a powerseller is pulling in several hundred or thousand dollars a month by posting items on ebay for auction, one can easily see how profits come into play. That doesn't make it fair, but it does happen. It's hard to argue that an uneven balance doesn't exist, when a guy can get indefinitly suspended for 3 npb's or several negatives, but some powersellers can operate with negative feedback that exceed 20 or more. Not that I'm some kind of Holy Joe or anything.

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Maybe it will just have to come to a lawsuit to really change things with ebay's policy. I don't think I would have a problem with that, just as long as they leave Oreo cookies the hell alone!

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Posted By: jay berhens

Did you sede some joker is trying to make illegal or kids to purchase Oreo cookies in California?

Jay

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Posted By: warshawlaw

that ebay is an "auctioneer" under California law and that undisclosed shill bidding is unlawful in CA. In my humble opinion, ebay is breaking the law every time it countenances a shill bid in an auction. That said, we must distinguish between types of shill bids. BRSZ set up another account and shilled his own auctions with it. That sort of redundancy should be readily caught by the programmers at ebay, so I find them culpable. Third party shilling, however, is impossible to police. If I make a deal with you to bid on your auctions to a certain level, there is just no way that ebay can be expected to figure it out. A lot of bids could be a shill--it could be a spirited fight between two dunderheads, too, which leaves ebay with "plausible deniability", to quote the spiritual forbearer of the present administration (sorry, couldn't resist; and yes, it is embarrassing that the architects of the Nixonian nightmare were mostly all lawyers--it should be similarly embarrassing to the non-lawyers that the present batch of crooks are all CEO types).

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Posted By: runscott

In addition, my thought is that if ebay sets up certain rules in addition to California law, then we should have to follow those as well, even if they are legal in the eyes of the law. In other words, I don't particularly mind ebays rules, but I would like to see them enforced fairly.