I smell a rat. Unfortunately, I don't have a way to kill it.

As I've mentioned previously, I have been hunting for an older laptop to use as a word processor. One of my searches yielded a PII with a fair amount of RAM. Just enough to do what I will be demanding of it, but little enough to keep the purchase price low. I put my bid in, with less than an hour to go and was extremely surprised to see it go for a final price of $1,025.

Since you can get a fair amount of NEW laptop, with a warranty, for that amount, something smelled fishy. So it was no surprise to me today when I logged in to see that the item had been relisted (less than 24 hours after closing, no less). Less of a surprise to me when the bid history showed two bidders bidding up the item, one of whom had created the account the DAY of the bidding war. It's fairly obvious that the seller used a shill, or created a seperate account herself to bid the item to a level where noone would buy it...especially when the starting price was above the top legitimate bid. The new listing ended early with Buy It Now.

So what we have here was a fairly obvious scam. The seller got a better real life offer and bidded the item up to end the auction and sell it to the real life buyer. And used the relisting feature to add an air of legitimacy.

But because I wasn't the winning bidder, there is no pipeline for complaint to eBay's complaint system. Sure, if I had won, I could complain about the item. But because the shill won, only the shill could complain. Meaning, there's really nothing they'll do about it, sadly.

Shilling is quite directly against eBay's Terms of Service. But if there's no way to sanction a shill, it really isn't, is it?

To me, I'm glad to be out from under this seller. Someone who would act in that manner is not a seller I would want to buy from anyway. But it's sad eBay doesn't have a better way of dealing with crooks like this.