I offered the seller $50 which he felt was too little. So he outbid me with a second account, because I only bid to $46.... Too bad for him, now he's sitting on his own merchandise.
I have been looking at HP41s and I did notice this seller had one that I thought had sold once or twice and *poof** magically relisted. Always similar ".... from dad's estate".
In my mail correspondence with him he wrote me that he has several of the HP48 cards and always uses the same image, just like he does with his HP35....
By the way: the HP48 card I bid on originally had no minimum sale price and was listed at $25. After I gave my offer of $50 to the seller he added a minimum selling price within 24 hours (twice as high as my bid).
(04-22-2020 12:09 PM)HP-Collection Wrote: [ -> ]By the way: the HP48 card I bid on originally had no minimum sale price and was listed at $25. After I gave my offer of $50 to the seller he added a minimum selling price within 24 hours (twice as high as my bid).
The trick here is to place a bid, then the start price is fixed.
(04-22-2020 12:09 PM)HP-Collection Wrote: [ -> ]By the way: the HP48 card I bid on originally had no minimum sale price and was listed at $25. After I gave my offer of $50 to the seller he added a minimum selling price within 24 hours (twice as high as my bid).
The trick here is to place a bid, then the start price is fixed.
Pauli
Exactly. I've never understood why more buyers don't do this.
But twice recently, after doing this to secure the low start, and then seeing no other bid activity, the seller ended the auction as 'error in listing' and within a few days, item was relisted at much higher starting price. eBay 'looked into it' but nothing changed. All smart buyers can do is avoid sellers like this, but there are so many buyers out there, some idiot will eventually the stupid high prices... sigh,,,
(04-22-2020 11:23 AM)BillBee Wrote: [ -> ]I have been looking at HP41s and I did notice this seller had one that I thought had sold once or twice and *poof** magically relisted. Always similar ".... from dad's estate".
-Bill
His dad must've died about fourteen times so far by my count.
Matthais, good observation!! The best course of action if you believe a second account is being used to drive up bids is to click on "Report Item" then
Report Category-> Listing Practices
Reason for Report -> Fraudulent listing activities
Detailed reason-> Seller is using other accounts to inflate item prices
If you look at the activity of the "shilling" account, they have bid 60 times on 24 items - all of them from the same seller, no bids on any other sellers' items- very suspicious indeed.
I assumed correctly that the "2" feedback score on the shilling account is from the same seller, who left himself feedback on 2 recent transactions.
Since Ebay's system anonymizes slightly different each time, it acts like an inefficient fountain code
Combining information from the 24 listings, one can piece together an anagram of the shilling userid: fr113356789
(may or may not contain double 1's or double 3's)...
I suspect ebay's userid scrambling code/polynomial is related to the item number, if anyone wants a good puzzle to write a "decryptor" for ebay's obfuscation.