eBay seller get fined $475K for Shill bidding
Jul-2007
A jewellery company in the US who were shill bidding on a massive scale has been fined $475K.
Ezra Dweck and employees of his company, EMH Group, placed more than 232,000 such bids worth some $US5 million over about a one-year period.
Full story here
I find this pretty hard to believe! At auctioning4u if we get one of our employees bidding on an item we get hammered. eBay detects this by IP address and also shipping address and email etc.
Also how did they find the time to do place all those bids? Amazing
I had the misfortune of buying what I believed was a car from a private seller on eBay but it turned out to be a dealer who had eBay accounts all over the place and after being conned I managed to connect the accounts to eight other accounts using telephone numbers and different cars he had sold and soon discovered other people were also looking for the same scam artist
In the first instance DO NOT CONTACT eBay as they are particularly keen to hide such activities from the public in an attempt to reassure members that it’s safe on eBay and will hide behind the data protection act if asked for detail needed in order to take action yourself.
DO REMEMBER TO SAVE OR PRINT the pages relating to any wrong doing before eBay removed them and changed the data in order to claim that you were not in fact the winning bidder as happened in my case and don’t be put off perusing eBay when they suddenly start replying to you complaints in a foreign language such as Flemish.
You can be sure eBay collected it fees from the person who conned me and have access to IP Addresses and bank details to stop these people opening a new account so from a commercial perspective they are on the side of the criminals however help is at hand with site such as http://www.Ebusters.co.uk, http://www.GoofBay.com when help monitor and catch these criminals.
If your not convince that eBay are involved in such illegal activities then see https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/24/ebay_shill_lawsuit/ that will maybe change your mind.
One last little tip is to save your time from complaining on eBay forums as you will soon discover such unfriendly topics are weighted to quickly disappear off the bottom of the screen and don’t believe all them cars that went unsold with no reserve at £0.99 with no bids as it’s a clear manipulation of the data by eBay as I have witnessed this myself.