Have I been shilled?

On 11/26/2010 1:31 PM, Beanie wrote:
wrote in message
2...
I won an auction on ebay beating another bidder who, according to his
stats, has "Bid activity (%) with this seller: 90%". The bidders feedback
is only 41. Do I have grounds to register a complaint to either the seller
or ebay? Without this bidder, I would have received the item for $50 less.

Complaining to the seller would be fruitless since if it was a case of shilling,
he would be complicit and would deny everything anyway.
OTOH, since you won the item at a price you were apparently willing to pay, I
don't see what you have to complain of.



Back on December 4, 2009 I watched what had to be a shill going on for a
piece of electronic equipment. The item that should have been about
$25, based on past auctions I watched, wound up going for $103.62 after
10 bids. Considering the limited use of the item in question, 10 bids
was rather unusual but the three bidders were all feedback of between
zero and two. After the auction ended, I bookmarked the item page to
wait for feedback to appear to get an idea of who was so stupid to pay
an overly inflated price (this is one hole in the eBay privacy setup -
unless feedback is kept private, you can see the item and the buyer
listed in the sellers feedback). Oddly enough, feedback never appeared
and buyers "disappeared". The seller is now NARU. What is strange
about the NARU is the seller had a feedback of 1349 with 99.8% positive
so this was not some fly-by-night operation.

I do get suspicious when I am winning an auction at a good price and
some new buyer with a very very low feedback (less than 10) suddenly
makes a bid towards the end of the auction. I even had one where a
buyer beat me yet no feedback ever appeared for either the buyer or the
seller. I am guessing the seller or a friend of the seller wanted to
bump the price but got stuck "buying" the item, as I was not willing to
increase my bid, and decided not to relist for fear of triggering an
investigation.