USATODAY.com - Eight eBay sellers admit to entering phony bids. A number of sellers have been caught red handed with shill bidding -- bidding either on their own auctions or colluding with others to bid each other's items up. Shill bidding should not be a problem for most consumer items as long as the buyer is smart about setting a reasonable max price to bid. I think that the shill bidders are pushing the bids little by little to the upper limits to see which bidders have set a higher than normal price, which is definitely illegal. If only eBay could catch and prosecute more shill bidders, it'll be better overall for the consumer and eBay. I wonder if they've developed software to detect such activity. I don't imagine that it's that difficult to do -- there's a limited number of IP addresses in the ether and they could use IP addresses as a form of unique identifier to track activity. Credit card companies have long been able to track aberrant card usage, eBay should be able to identify and track more shill bidders.
Posted by johnvu at November 8, 2004 09:24 PM