Hi.

Well, I'm bidding on a faulty camcorder on ebay, and winning the auction. It was sitting at £21 for a couple of days, I bid higher and it's now going to me for £31. Then someone who has never bid for anything comes along and bids rather higher, 10 minutes before the end of the auction. Throwing caution to the winds, I increase my bid by £5, and get it back. Then he counterbids, raising the stakes to a level I don't like, and wins the auction. Nothing too unusual. I chalk it up the odd craving people seem to have for overpriced broken camcorders, and move on to the next auction ending in a couple of hours.

10 minutes after the end of the auction, the seller contacts me and says that due to a hoax bidder, I'm the auction winner. I check the values, and think "great, take these bids off and we're back to the £31". He also relists the item for 24 hours with a buy-it-now proce of about £67, which causes ebay to automatically re-offer it to me.

I contact him and ask how much he is thinking I should pay (being careful, of course), and he replies that I can have it for £65. Quick as a flash, I riposte, pointing out that the hoax bidder's two bids, if removed, leave my winning high bid as £31, not the maximum bid I put in. He reiterates that he wants £65 + P&P.

At this point I get a little paranoid, and do some checking. The "hoax" bidder joined ebay 2 days ago, and had also bid before on the same item to the value of £35 (just over the longstanding £21 bid), but the seller apparently rejected his bid at about mid-day today on the basis of zero/low feedback. Then I bid, and lo and behold he's back. Then he's apparently a hoax bidder, a mere 10 minutes after the end of the auction. Did he call to gloat, or something?

To add to all this, his ebay ID is xxx8simon, while the email address of the seller is simon8xx at aol.com (munged email). Feels odd, but I suppose it could be a coincidence Also, although this is probably just proof of an AOL user, the seller can't seem to work out where the caps lock on his keyboard is.

Realising that there may be something fishy going on, I email him back and offer him £50 including postage, pointing out that this is comfortably above the amount I should really pay assuming I actually won free of interference, but willing to be nice. I also point out the odd coincidences mention above, apologising if I was drawing the wrong conclusions. There is a long delay, and finally he responds thanking me for my interest and saying that the parts cost of the thing is more than the price he's currently asking. Doesn't comment on the near-accusation of shill-bidding at all.

So. Am I reading too much into it, or is this my first encounter with the everpresent danger of ebay scams? Note that to add to my annoyance, when the his offer first came in I cancelled the other unit I was bidding on (since I didn't want two), and looking back would have won it for less than this one. Damn.

pca

Sounds to me that the seller was trying to work out what you maximum bid was. Once he'd worked that out, he tried to push it up to scam you.

Quote:
Could he really be that stupid though?

Yes. He's from Birmingham

I've reported it to ebay. The other odd thing about it is that the seller didn't cancel the 'hoax' bids, but relisted the item as a buy-it-now, which a suspicious part of me thinks is to avoid the automatic winning bid becoming the next valid one.

pca

I'm sure that happens many times that's why now I only bid at the last moment.

When I sell an item I set the buy it now and first bid to the price I want for the item. Then there is no bidding.

I agree, that is too much of a coincidence.

If you don't get anywhere reporting it to eBay, let me know and I will call the Powerseller line on Monday and see if they're interested in checking whether they're the same person. Although they won't reveal or discuss what resources are available for researching users, the Powerseller support team have surprised me a number of times when I've reported suspicious bidding/selling.

I checked the user ID's you posted and they don't exist. Either they are already NARU (not a registered user) or most likely you're concealing the names of the accused?

Yeah, I would say it's a scam, man! I had almost the identical thing happen when I was bidding on an old 8Bit machine (Commodore SX-64). I really wanted it, but it WAS 20 years old or so, so I bid and was winning up to the last 5 min. Then the old scam happend...I bid twice more, then let it go. I got an email about 10 minutes after the auction ended saying that the winner retracted the bid and I could have it for the last price I bid. I refused. I don't believe a bid can be retracted in lest than 5 minutes before the end...I just took it as a sign of a scam and said so in my email back to him. What a cussing out I got in his return email. I just forwared it all to ebay and let them sort it out....
I can be depressing somtimes, but I have made some nice deals as well....
Buyer Beware!

I've had scammers false bid on my auctions and never pay up, at which I have always courteously offered the item to the second highest (legitimate) bidder for his bid price.

I don't get it. Why would a scammer bid your auction up? What do they get out of it? Or is it some kind of bad blood kind of thing?

I didn't think ebay worked that way. If the current bid is $10, and you bid $100. The bid that is registered is $11.00 (or whatever the minimum increment is). Then when someone else bids $12, your bid of $100 trumps it at $13, and so on untill someone actually bids over you at $101.

I don't see how the bluf bid would ever register... Ok. It would work, but only if the scamming bidder had one legit and two fake overbids.

Too much work, man. If I get outbid twice, I usally bow out and wait for the next one...I have been able to get almost whatever I was looking for within a couple of weeks. Of course I don't often bid on the rare items...Except for a Sansui 5050 that I just HAD to have...still did pretty good on it.

I wasn't suggesting anyone should actually do that! No doubt some low life do, though.

Rob