Thread: i've been shot!

Couple of reasons.

1) The seller may have a shill bidder who bids higher than you (which reveals your max bid), then retracts that bid and bids just under your max bid. You pay your max and the losing bidder never had any intention of buying that item. Yes it's illegal, but proving it can be tough. Sniping during the last few seconds makes it difficult to pull this off, even with shilling software (which I'm sure exists too).

2) The more bids an item has, the more bids it tends to get - people tend to be more interested in things other people are interested in. Don't encourage them.

3) Bidding your max early simply gives some other guy a chance to develop auction fever as he sees himself beaten by only a dollar, so he winds up inching up his max bid "just a few dollars more" every day or so to until he wins the item or loses anyway but at a much higher price. Yes he wanted it more, but mostly because he couldn't stand to lose, and partly because the mere existence of your higher bid justified the higher price - your bid acts as a 3rd-party valuation for him, even though your credentials are unknown. For experienced ebayers whose ebay name is well-known, this is a worse problem because our credentials *are* well-known. And ebay lets you find out all the auctions a given individual is currently bidding on, so you can "stalk" an experienced bidder to find the good stuff.

Oh my- that's just sneaky. Getting snipe account now...thanks for the great info!

And if you're looking for cheap sniping programs look on google for gixen sniper. It's free.

Originally Posted by mparker762

Couple of reasons.

1) The seller may have a shill bidder who bids higher than you (which reveals your max bid), then retracts that bid and bids just under your max bid. You pay your max and the losing bidder never had any intention of buying that item. Yes it's illegal, but proving it can be tough. Sniping during the last few seconds makes it difficult to pull this off, even with shilling software (which I'm sure exists too).

I have seen this happen alot lately on ebay. It happened on one I was bidding on. The person kept retracting their bid, they did like eight times to me, just staying below my bid. So I said enough of this and retracted my with 10 seconds to go, and they got stuck with it. This was the first time I had ever retracted on bidding. I talked to ebays live support about it and somehow they found out it was the seller who was doing it.

do you happen the know the seller name...would be a good idea to warn ppl of a sketchy seller

yes, please hlp to warn ppl about that seller

Originally Posted by edk442

do you happen the know the seller name...would be a good idea to warn ppl of a sketchy seller

From what I gather he has been banned from ebay..I thought I had saved an email from ebay from that auction but I must have deleted it. I think it was something like mehanman121

What I don't like are the ebay auctions where the bidders names are hidden. That makes me think there is something fishy going on and I won't bid on them.