If you follow the bidding, it also appears that some were bidding against themselves!
Over the years, I've noticed many many similar type of bid activity. It seems to happen a lot. I wonder is it something to do with the auto bidders.
Or is it shill bidders using a
Nibble-Bidding or a
Discover-and-Stop strategy? The nibble bidder incrementally bids to discover, but never exceed, the maximum bid placed by a genuine bidder.
Ebay has no incentive to stamp out shill bidding fraud. Its profits are higher with shilling than without it. The higher the bid the higher the fee.
In fact, Ebay encourages shilling, by disguising the bidders' identities. Then it invented the
Second Chance scheme which has made it even worse.
If the shill bidder mistakenly has the highest bid, he either retracts it (as happened in that auction) or if it's too late to retract, he simply fades away.
Ebay then gives the next highest bidder - the genuine bidder - a
Second Chance to buy the item. That's a perfect recipe for shill bidding!
Ebay has claimed that just 1 in 10,000 auctions involve shill bidding. Yet in 2008, a team of researchers estimated shilling to be 1 in 50 auctions. Today, the extent of the fraud is perhaps 1 in 10 or even 1 in 5 auctions.
Ebay has very few scruples. There are many other areas where the Corporation actively conceals fraud. Counterfeiting is one huge area.
We all use Ebay - largely because there's nothing else - but we run a considerable risk of falling victim to fraud. Ebay is doing precious little to protect consumers, and the British Government is doing even less.
EDIT:
Philip Cohen has written some interesting Case Studies of Shill Bidding (these fraudsters are rookies at the game.. they're so obvious!).. [1]
Philip is something of an authority on detecting sham auctions [2][3]
He graciously cast his expert eye over that auction and made the following comments:
That is an odd one. Why would they chase the £360 “box” when they could have had the other for £41 or indeed one of the other two that did not even receive a bid? (I would have sniped one of the two with no bids.) Surely, this has to be a case of this particular mob thinking they were getting a phone too. There are a lot of idiots shopping on eBay but, but even then, why not bid for one of the others? Very strange.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/csc/phonewarehouseuk/m.html?rt=nc&LH_Complete=1&_fln=1&_trksid=p3911.c0.m283
Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done to identify possible shill biddings; unless it is particularly obvious, you have to examine more than just a couple of of auctions for a particular dealer and watch for any common bidders appearing too regularly, as I did in my second case study (2009) spreadsheet exercise, accessed at
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22904
It took a lot of effort but I was p***d off enough to do it at the time. And, having done the exercise I came to the conclusion that shill bidding on nominal value start auctions by many professional sellers was rampant, and eBay has profited from knowingly facilitating such criminal activity.
All I can say is be aware and be careful when buying anything of value at (any) auction.
Regards
Philip Cohen
cheers, a
[1]
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22659[2]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/10/ebay_and_shill_bidding/[3]
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/phoney-bidding-rampant-on-ebay-20090714-djsr.html
