in the past couple of months it seems that every auciton i have been bidding on, when i am the only bidder, within a couple of days of bidding, new users are bidding on the same auctions, that have joined within the time i have bid on an auction. i find it very suspicious & i think they are being shill bidded but i can not prove it. but i just find it awefully weird! and there have a few auctions that i'll give up cause the "new users" have ran the auction up so high, i cant afford it, but low & behold i will get a pm with a "second chance offer" asking if i want to buy the item for the last price i bid...does that seem suspicious to you? anyone else having these problems or am i just having crappy luck with stupid sellers that wont list their auctions for what they want out of it?

(moving to TS DF)

Personally, that sounds proper fishy to me

Make a note of which sellers you suspect and avoid them with all your might, no matter how yummy the ponies they're selling are.

People who try to con others... GAH!!!

I have seen this a lot lately on ebay. Always suspicious but unprovable, grr.
Often the "new user" bids up the item so high that no one else will bother with the auction any more.. and then after a while the seller relists it, claiming the zero feedback person turned out to be a non payer.
In those cases I always wonder if it was shill bidding gone wrong because seller got to greedy. Sometimes if you check out the new user you can see that they only have bid on that particular seller's items, so.. yes, very suspicious.

tootie_tails wrote:

Sometimes if you check out the new user you can see that they only have bid on that particular seller's items, .

How can you tell what they've bid on? I thought you could only tell through feedback which wouldn't be left if it's shill bidding. Is there another way?

zabe77 wrote:

tootie_tails wrote: Sometimes if you check out the new user you can see that they only have bid on that particular seller's items, . How can you tell what they've bid on? I thought you could only tell through feedback which wouldn't be left if it's shill bidding. Is there another way?

yes i'd like to know as well....please do tell....

ThirteenSpiders wrote:

zabe77 wrote: tootie_tails wrote: Sometimes if you check out the new user you can see that they only have bid on that particular seller's items, . How can you tell what they've bid on? I thought you could only tell through feedback which wouldn't be left if it's shill bidding. Is there another way? yes i'd like to know as well....please do tell....

On the ebay home page click ~ Advanced Search ~ on this page you will see on the left hand side under FIND ITEMS the words ITEMS BY BIDDER...click this and then enter the users ID and you can see all the things that person has bid on

and I agree, there seems to be a lot of shill bidding on ebay...I've reported a few but nothing ever happens as ebay always says they need more evidence :s

That's definitely suspicious. See if you can prove it and report it.

you have to be signed in as well to see what they have bid on in the past.
That does sound fishy to me as well if they keep sending you second chance offers like that.

Yes, I saw some tonight when I was trying to bid on a pony >_> I was the higest bidder for a while then about 7 newbies with 0 feedback came in and outbid me one after the other O_O It was strange, but I think explainable ..

I see it alot. I investigate on my own first and then report my findings to ebay. I have seen a few people get banned....not that doesn't mean they will open a new account. I am always cautious with second chance offers too. I was given one on a lot of 5 ponies and I paid her. When the ponies arrived they weren't the same five in the auction. She told me the second chance was for 5 different ponies. I filed with ebay and she was banned for fraud selling.

nndemeter1980 wrote:

I see it alot. I investigate on my own first and then report my findings to ebay. I have seen a few people get banned....not that doesn't mean they will open a new account. I am always cautious with second chance offers too. I was given one on a lot of 5 ponies and I paid her. When the ponies arrived they weren't the same five in the auction. She told me the second chance was for 5 different ponies. I filed with ebay and she was banned for fraud selling.

Thats horrible...good that she was banned but what she did..thats so wrong

ThirteenSpiders wrote:

zabe77 wrote: tootie_tails wrote: Sometimes if you check out the new user you can see that they only have bid on that particular seller's items, . How can you tell what they've bid on? I thought you could only tell through feedback which wouldn't be left if it's shill bidding. Is there another way? yes i'd like to know as well....please do tell....

Yes, what others have said already - be signed in and then check out bidder under "Advanced search". This is the same way I did it.
You can do it for most bidders and sellers, for some countries' bidders/sellers this feature has been disabled though (Germany etc) because of "privacy issues".

that sucks! It's happened to me before, too.

This just happened to me as a seller! A user bid on both of my auctions during the last hour and then ended up being non-payers. I filed a report with Ebay and evetually got my listing fee refunding, but it is a HUGE pain in my behind because now I've relisted the items and I'm scared of non-paying bidders again. I've never had it happen before, so it really stinks! I've since banned users with 0 feedback from bidding on my auctions.
VERY frustrating for both the seller and other potential buyers.

LOL I got Banned from ebay for a day because someone turned my name in as a Shill Bidder! They took down my store and everything! The thing was, there was nothing that I bid on, and my ebay ID didnt show up on anything that was bid on! Figure that one out! I had to relist over 200 ponies! Then ebay issued me an apology and so on and said it was their mistake. Still, I never heard of that before!