Len wrote:
> They have, therefore, conspired to
> hold down the price the seller can receive. The whole group has
> committed a felony by so doing. Shilling on an auction
> (conspiring to drive the price up) is just as illegal.
All true. It's just as wrong for three people to "decide who needs it more"
and have two of them refrain from bidding as it is for the seller to call up
his friends and ask them to bid the item up to see if he can get more money
out of a "live" buyer (which I'm sure happens often on eBay).
That said, buyers hold the final card, in that nobody's holding a gun to
your head to get you to bid more than you want to pay.
I've only even bid on one thing that I regretted the next day. I simply
asked the person if they would let me out of the contract, and they did.
I've never had a buyer back out of a sale.
Since eBay came along, there has been an awful lot of photographic junk in
and out of my house. <s>
--Mike
P.S. One caution is to look for withdrawn bids. One scam I know about is
that a seller gets one friend (or just does it himself from an unrelated
address) to enter a false bid in order to see what the high bidder's top
price is. Then that person quickly withdraws his bid--but he now knows what
the top bidder will pay. The seller then gets another friend to bid just
below the high bidder's top price, thus eking the most out of the bidder.
Example: let's say you want a camera and enter a proxy bid of $200. The bid
increment is $5 and the high price is $100. So if nobody bids $105 or more,
you will win the item for $100.
But say a bidder enters a bid of $1,100. He becomes the high bidder at $205,
which tells him that YOU have bid $200. Then he withdraws his bid, stating
as a reason the fact that he meant to bid $110 and hit an extra zero by
mistake. So the high bid goes back down to your $100 again. Then he tells
the seller that your top bid is $200, so the seller gets another friend to
place a bid of $195. Your bid of $200 beats the $195, but now, to "win" the
auction, you have paid $200 instead of $100. The seller has in effect
cheated you out of $100, even though he hasn't forced you to go above your
highest bid.
This happened to me one time. I had entered a high bid at an odd number, and
somebody took me right up to that number but didn't go over it, which seemed
suspicious to me. Of course, this sort of thing is hard to prove, but I'm
pretty sure I got scammed.
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