ebay "User ID Kept Private" Scam

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Beck

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http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220028039301

Here's how it works:

Seller hides bidder identities so he can use one or two bogus accounts to bid up his own auction without detection.

This auction is likely one of these. I could be wrong, but I call them as I see them.

1. There is no good reason to hide identities except for a product, like X-rated material, etc. The seller's explanation doesn't work.
2. People just don’t bid up no-reserve auctions anymore, until the last minute. This alone makes the auction suspicious. Sellers try to create excitement by making it appear that “everyone wants it!” This one started at $9.99 with no reserve. :rolleyes: It also saves them $$$ on the insertion fee.

I won’t bid on an auction like this. There is nothing worse than the feeling you are bidding against phantom bidders. 100% feedback or not, I don’t trust this one.

The funniest are when the seller overestimates and ends up being the high bidder. In the past you would see a lot of "Auction ended early because of a mistake in the listing." It's more difficult now to end an auction with 12 hrs or less to go.

:)
 
That has scam written all over it. If you advance search Dolby 363 for completed listings, you'll see that the last one went for $390. That's in the ballpark of where this auction is now with three days left. Why all the sudden would there be such a mad dash for this unit, and why would every bidder be private? The seller isn't even trying to be convincing with his shill bidders. It saddens me to see the quality of ebay scammers declining.
 
Yeah, that's a weird excuse, it doesn't make sense. Why would a buyer need his protection?? Protection from what, and how does that stop scammers??

I thought I noticed a slight increase in lameness in some of the ebayers lately. Not long ago I sold 4 items, out of the four I got only feedback from one of them. Before that I had gotten feedback from all of them.
 
you know how if you bid an item up in increments, eventually you might find out where the high bidder is? for example if the high bid is $100, when you are bidding up, 80, high bid becomes 85. bid 90, high bid becomes 95. bid 100, you still lose but now the high bid is still only 100. so you know that is the high bid amount.

that seemed to happen to me on this cymbal I bought a few weeks back. in the last 30 seconds the item was bid up to the bid level *just* under my max bid. by a smaller amount than the smallest bid increment. I know it could have been a coincidence but I wondered if the seller didn't have a bot that did this all very quickly.

sketchy.
 
The trick i reckon i have come across is being bid against and the other chap winning, only to be contacted straight after with a second chance offer of my maximum bid.

I was the only other bidder so i offered him what it would have cost me if the other fella hadn't been bidding.

I never heard back...
 
Bid once, bid late, bid your max. If you don't get it, then it wasn't meant to be. That's how I approach it.

FWIW, I never bid on private auctions for the reasons stated above. Too often they are an excuse for shill bidding.
 
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