odd thing I may have notice about Ebay

A

Alan Molstad

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Aug 13, 2006
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422
So about a year or more ago I was bidding on a cool sheep handle 52100 knife on Ebay.

There were only me and one other guy bidding against each other for this great looking knife.

We both kept going back and forth, always just bidding the minimum amount to get past the other guy's last bid.

Then about 6 hours before the end of bidding, a new poster came and bid way over what me and the other guy were bidding.

This new guy's bid was so high that he was able to put an end to the bidding.
I felt knida bad because it was my turn to up the bid that he had stepped on.

Anyway, needless to say I and the other guy didnt bid anymore, and I was informed that i had lost the auction by Ebay.

I checked on the name of the guy who out bid me, and it turns out that was his first action on Ebay and that was his first day.

about a week or so later I wrote an email to the guy who had sold that knife on Ebay that I had tried to win.
I asked the guy if he had any more sheep horn knives for sale?
I also closed my email to him with a congratulations for selling his knife for such a huge amount of cash.

I got an answer from the guy and right away he told me that the guy who had out bid us for the knife, had backed out of the deal, so the knife was actually sold to that other guy who I had been bidding against because his name was next in line..

I kinda felt ripped-off!

except for the fact that that other 3rd guy had bid a huge amount , I would have made an attempt to get that winning bid myself. After all, it had been my turn that the 3rd guy had taken.
I felt that I had had my "turn" to up my bid over the other guy taken away.

well.....This week, something like this just happend to me yet again!

I was bidding against one other person for a car part,
Me and the other guy were inching our bids up a little at a time, when out of the blue this 3rd guy pops in, and dumps a HUGE bid on us, killing my chance to take my turn and bid again.

I started think about this and so I wrote to the guy who was selling the car part I needed.
and yes, once again, the 3rd guy who had won the auction had backed-out of the deal and the car part had been sold to the next guy in line for a price i could have easly beaten had I the chance to bid.........

I have a sneaky feeling that someone has been cheating ....

am I wrong?
 
Yes and no. You may be bidding too soon. Be the guy at the end of the auction. No sense in a bidding war with lots of time to go. Just lets everyone know you want it, and you will jack up the price on yourself...
 
I'm not a big ebay guru or anything but how did someone place a high bid like that ? I thought that once bidding was underway the bid only would increase at the minimum ammt. to win the bid ?? Could be wrong edit.... uinless there is a "buy it now"
 
I guess what im thinking is that...Lets say i WANT something that you want,

I bid $5
You bid $6
I bid $7 then I go to my work computer, log in to Ebay under a different name, Bid $25

You think $25 is crazy and stop bidding
I win, but back out of the deal

Seller goes to the next name (me) on the list and sells it for $7

You would have went to $10....
 
When I post an item for sale I state that I insist on no 'new' bidders or bidders with negative feedback... that way, if a bid feels fishy to me (as the seller should have seen), I'd refuse it and continue the auction. Of course, this policy is the seller's responsibility to adopt, and not the buyer's, but it seems to weed out the bottomfeeders!
 
Ebay needs to enforce this by making the sellers relist the item - not sell to the next-in-line. This would totally eliminate the chance of getting "kited" like that.
 
What you just learned is that second place can actually be the winner. Hopefully the seller left negative feedback about the dellinquent buyer that won the auction.
 
There's also quite a scam running on ebay where the odd person comes in with the high bid and you lose, the next day you get an email telling you the high bidder backed out and if you'd still like the item, to send funds to..........

Problem is, it's a scam and the funds go to the crooks. It's very big right now.

Personally, I don't trust anything from ebay at all, besides, they and paypal are anti gun. Why deal with, and support your enemy?:thumbdn: :barf:
 
ebay sucks plain and simple too much fraud... e-bay is being sued so much right now i doubt they will be around much longer... go to: paypalsucks.com. and see e-bay for what they really are.. a bunch of scamming fraud dealing dirtbags
 
get over it, if you didn't bid you ain't gonna get it.
Some smuck beat you out of it ...
nobody ever said life and ebay was fair.:confused:

life is life:D
 
My wife and I sell a lot of stuff on ebay (mostly her glass art now), but I have sold a lot of knives and swords there too. We do something like 30K per year on ebay, (mostly on items costing about $40, to give you an idea of how many transactions we're doing) and have for several years.

Haven't had problems with ebay, but someone did try that scam that Mike just mentioned on one of my swords. They tried to get the second-place bidder to send the 3K to them. They had a fake email account that looked like ours and everything. Luckily, Mr. #2 was a previous customer and had my email on file. He contacted me to say he'd take the sword when I hadn't yet offered it to him. We straightened it out and he ended up with the sword after all. Meanwhile, I reported the scammer to the FBI (Had the scammer's emails with routing info and email account info). A couple weeks later, I'm getting this email from someone claiming to be a kid in Canada saying somone hijacked his account, it wasn't him, etc. I don't know what happened, but I think somone was making some visits. (at least I'd like to think so).
We had a couple crooks hit us for little things, and paypal did reverse a $50 payment from Germany weeks after it cleared, which kind of freaked me out. (Some German defrauded their bank and sent us payment with these funds.) I thought it kind of rich that paypal took the money from us after it was 'cleared'. Seems to me that's their problem.

But all in all, we haven't had any real problem with either outfit, and have made a few bucks with their help, so I don't know ...
 
Replying to the original thread starter; I believe the guy who outbid you in the auction was probably a friend of the seller, who was doing his best to up the price of the item.
 
Danbo said:
Replying to the original thread starter; I believe the guy who outbid you in the auction was probably a friend of the seller, who was doing his best to up the price of the item.
Click to expand...
That could be true.
The only reason I kinda think it was the same guy I had been bidding against all along is the huge amount the 3rd guy bid . It was just way out of line and context for the item. New it would not take as much money as the guy bid.

I felt at the time, and still do, that the winning bid was just a way to end the bidding....to end MY bidding...

However , I have heard of guys who sell things on ebay, then log-on and pretend to be bidding on their own stuff to jack up the amounts.
 
they mention that exact scenario on ebay help somewhere they sugest that it is the guy you were competing with having a second account and useing it to block you from bidding, your right, you were cheated! its a big no no as far as ebay is concerned, one person is bidding against you and then he logs in under a new account and bids huge to block you then he cancles that bid so that his other account wins, you can report it to ebay and they will cheack on contact details and fancy computer stuff to see if it was the same person and if they catch them they get in big trouble but all ebay ca n do is cancle their account and its not hard to get a new one.

brett
 
ebay is not always cheaper either. do your homework and don't go any higher than a preset amount. for example i bid up to $66 on a knife, i knew if i didn't win i could still get the knife for $67 from another source. the reason i bid on the knife in the first place is because there is always that chance you might get it a lot cheaper.
 
No one was cheating you!
How do you know he put in a huge bid, and you stopped your bidding because of it?
If you were bidding against one another, and as you continued to put in minimum bids, his bid would only go up by the bid increment, making it appear he was bidding against you, when in fact, you were biding against his much larger proxy bid, and you were just creeping the bid up to his.
The third bidder comes along, puts in one bid, which is larger than your opponent bidder, and now you see where the second bidder was at with his proxy bid.
If you had continued to increment your bid up against bidder 2, you would have ended up bidding exactly what bidder 3 had won it at...
So, by trying to sneak in a little larger bid, you accomplished nothing, and lost.
If bidder 3 didn't follow through on payment, then bidder 2 is who gets a chance to buy it, at his high bid.
You, thinking you might get it cheap, gave up your chance to win.
You need figure out the max you will pay, then enter then bid as close to the end of the bidding as possible. If you win this way, you will probably get a better deal than showing interest early...
 
I dorked around on EBay a bit several years ago, decided it was full of shady tricks and scams, and haven't been back since. Plus I wouldn't touch PayPal with a ten foot pole.
 
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