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« on: 13 March 2009, 13:29:43 »
Hello all
I used to visit the forum regularly some years ago when I had an Omega. For various reasons I sold it and moved on, but I'm now looking for another. No, this is not a "wanted" ad.
Whatever you think of eBay, it does serve a purpose. My last Omega was bought & sold there and I think both deals were fair value.
Yesterday I became aware of a scam which apparently is fairly widespread but some of you may want to look out for.
I was watching a car about an hour before bid close. The price suddenly went up from £600 to £1050, so I gave it no further thought and looked elsewhere. After it closed it was listed in my watch-list as selling for just over £600. The £1050 bid had been retracted 30 seconds before it closed. This left the next highest bid as the winning bid. I had been in contact with the seller earlier so I suggested that they should be cautious about this sale. The seller advised me this morning that the winning bidders had turned up and had been very aggressive.
This bidding technique is known as Bid Shielding. The scammer, who is the eventual winner, enters a very high bid while the car is still at a low price about an hour before closure. This allows them to see if the previous high bidder is using automatic bidding. The scammer then gets his mate (or uses a second eBay account) to outbid him by a small amount. These two bids are now at such a high value that everybody else walks away. Just before closing, the scam-buddy withdraws his bid. Just as the bid closes, the price collapses back to just above the best bid that existed before scammy & buddy turned up.
Scammy walks away with a low winning bid and the seller loses out because legitimate bidders have been locked out. In yesterday's example, the seller seems to have been a decent person who placed their car in good faith.
As a seller, how do you stop this? Put a reserve on your car that you will be happy with. Check the bid record after closure and report any discrepancies to eBay (does that achieve anything, I wonder?).
I hope that helps someone get the fair value for their car.
Meantime, I'm back to eBay looking for mine.