Philip, you may be confusing email addresses with IP addresses.
They are different things.
Hi Countessa,
Yes, strictly speaking, what I should have said was “That’s what internet cafés are for …” and in that context I did mean IP addresses; there is no email address involved directly in the making of shill bids. In the first place there may be 10-20 email addresses involved in the obtaining of that rotating stock of 10-20 bidding IDs that every sophisticated shill-bidding seller seems to now have (but that is another story and comes back to effective validation of all users).
In any case the smart user can manipulate IP addresses—even “paid” broadband addresses (Bigpond actually wants an additional fee for a static IP address, otherwise the IP address will be dynamic, like the bidding aliases in the UK]) and can be changed simply by switching off/on your ADSL Router and therefore IP addresses are far from being a foolproof means of data matching for such security purposes. (Why else do you think that the dynamic “Bidder x” alias, that changed every auction, was eBay’s initially preferred form of masked bidding alias?)
Validation of users is a cost that eBay is not interested in incurring as, not only would it be a direct cost, it would also cause a reduction in revenue because it would make life much more difficult for the many unscrupulous sellers from whom, I suspect, eBay presently gets much of its revenue.
Hi Bazza,
The spreadsheet contains facts; I am quite happy to let those facts speak for themselves. Or are you, like Chris Dawson, implying that you have examined those facts but can see no suggestion of shill bidding by any of the listed sellers?
Bazza, if you are a professional seller I would be happy to analyse some of your auction sales: the spreadsheet needs some more examples of apparently scrupulous sellers to try to keep a balance (you can private message me your eBay selling ID and I will contract not to identify you regardless of the outcome). Can I be any fairer than that?
(By the way Bazza, you wouldn’t, by any chance, happen to be an acquaintance of my old friend from the Rocky Horror Show, would you?)
Hi Brumby,
Of course, you are right, when the preference is to not spotlight a matter, better to simply ignore it. When I have presented my draft articles to eBay for their comment thereon, they ignore me. They have offered feeble, devious, nonsensical responses to the media when the media has taken up the matter. But, me directly, they ignore—and I post under my own name and have been tracked down by others (including the media). Frankly, this is undoubtedly an area that eBay would prefer was left unexplored. That way they don’t have to face the perfidy of their position.
