First eBay seller to be prosecuted for false bidding | Hacker News Reader

First eBay seller to be prosecuted for false bidding

news.bbc.co.uk

16 pointscallbarney9 comments

On the dutch site marktplaats (a subsidiary of ebay, they bought it because it was too well entrenched) nonsense bids are pretty much the norm, it's fairly rare to get a significant bid on something and to see the buyer follow through.

There must be issues with weak legal backing and poor registration processes that lead to this?

In the UK a bid in an auction is a legal agreement to pay the price bid. One has to register with identifying details in order to receive goods and people often close auctions to those with no reputation unless they get sufficient assurance that the person is genuine they are not allowed to bid.

It's pretty trivial to ID most users from IP+ISP records (+ possibly a little social engineering) and "small claims" in the County Court are it seems up to £100,000 GBP. That sort of regime appears to make frivolous offers worth following up for the legally inclined.

Can't believe it's taken this long to have a prosecution - it must be done all the time! £5,000 is a pretty hefty fine though.

yeah the stability of eBay integrity and trust was really riding on this case... although defiantly agree £5k fine is ALOT but then again, how would you find an appropriate amount?

Well, he did it multiple times, and on big-ticket items (two Mercedes minivans). Five thousand quid doesn't sound inappropriately high.

I don't see a problem there. He still has to pay the ebay fees and everything, so he will loose anyway.

And he won't bid on the item himself if he thinks it's an adaquate price.

That's what reserve prices are for. To claim that there's no reserve price and then place shill bids to reach a certain minimum is deceptive.

The problem is that dummy bids by the vendor in an attempt to artificially drive up the price are against the rules of eBay's auction model. Buyers and sellers both agree to abide by certain rules, and one of those rules is that the seller only gets to make one "bid", the reserve, which is secret until it's reached and known when it's surpassed.

Now, you could equally well have a different auction model, whereby the seller gets to make as many bids as he likes. But this model would be much less attractive to buyers, since I know even if I'm the only buyer the seller is just going to keep increasing the price until he thinks he's got to the maximum I'm possibly going to spend. So as a buyer I'm much more inclined to buy on the single-reserve system than on the multiple-seller-bid system.

Dummy bids are a problem as old as auctions themselves, but it's good to see people being prosecuted when they're caught.

Winning with a shill bid defrauds the next highest bidder, to whom you had an obligation to sell.

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