<VV> Watch out ! :)

[Secular]

  A New eBay Bidding Scam?
  By Alan Mendelson 


  http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y200/m03/abu0009/s05


  Some funny things are happening with the bidding on auctions 
  on eBay, the online auction site. It seems that some collectibles 
  are getting many bids - perhaps too many bids - and the bids 
  are going up to ridiculously high prices. 

  But this is not a case of a seller who is using shills to increase the 
  bids for the items he is selling. No, this is a case of bidders creating 
  their own shills to scare away legitimate competing bidders.

  The scam works this way: One legitimate bidder finds an item he 
  wants to bid and buy, and he places a legitimate single bid on the 
  item. Then, using other bidding identities, he enters many more 
  bids that not only outbid his one legitimate bid but also outbids 
  all other bidders including the bids of the phony bidders he has created.


  In one instance, the legitimate bid for an item might stop at ten 
  dollars, but the phony bids could reach fifty or seventy dollars. Those 
  super-high phony bids have the effect of scaring way other legitimate 
  bidders - but in the last seconds of the auction, the phony bids are all 
  retracted, leaving the low legitimate bid to win the item.

  One Internet newsgroup member identified as John told other Internet 
  newsgroup members how he recognized one such scam: "Just the other 
  day, I was talking to my wife and trying to explain how a couple of 
  fraudulent bidders (or one bidder with multiple ID's) could bid up a coin 
  so high that the legitimate competition (other bidders) would take one 
  look at the auction and then pass it by without bidding. 

  Then at the last minute," he writes, "the scam-artist could withdraw his 
  high bid(s), leaving his second or third account the new highest bidder, 
  but with a much smaller amount to win the auction."

  His advice is that if you want to enter a legitimate bid, do so, and your 
  high bid might be reinstated if it turns out higher bids were fraudulent. 
  But with the eBay system and other Internet bidding systems, that might 
  not be possible because the Internet computers will only recognize a new 
  higher bid, and will not let you enter a bid that is lower than one that 
  already appears for the auction item.

  Watch out for this scam.


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  Also read:

  http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y200/m11/abu0025/s06

  Tony