Shilling question

[subject to change]

Does this auction look suspicious to anyone else, or am I being a bit paranoid here?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... K:MEWNX:IT

The seller had a large number of Mirror Gold's listed, and I noticed a number of bidders that had their percentage with this seller anywhere from 25-70%, all with numbers of bids in the hundreds, and all with pretty high feedback numbers. Just seems a bit fishy, since I didn't expect this card to go about $2-3.

 

[isotopes4]

probably just 2 or 3 people working on that set. if the seller has a large quantity of them, that would explain the amount of activity with that seller. if the 2 or 3 people get into a nickle & dime bidding war & its easy to hit 100-200 bids with the same seller if your talking 30 or 40 items

Just my opinion.
Michael

 

[Sly]

You also have to keep in mind, with this specific buyer, he's bid 6 times on 5 items. Two of these bids were on items from this seller, so it's going to come out to 33%. It may seem high...but in reality, it's two bids.

This is an old set and low-numbered. Nothing wrong here.

EDIT: Just realized, I'm assuming it was the SECOND bidder who was in question (and you were the winner). Regardless, as I said, an old set, I see it simply as someone who is collecting the set. I mean, it would take way too much time to sit there and bid on that many items just for the sake of shilling a bunch of $2-3 cards.

 

[subject to change]

You also have to keep in mind, with this specific buyer, he's bid 6 times on 5 items. Two of these bids were on items from this seller, so it's going to come out to 33%. It may seem high...but in reality, it's two bids.

This is an old set and low-numbered. Nothing wrong here.

EDIT: Just realized, I'm assuming it was the SECOND bidder who was in question (and you were the winner). Regardless, as I said, an old set, I see it simply as someone who is collecting the set. I mean, it would take way too much time to sit there and bid on that many items just for the sake of shilling a bunch of $2-3 cards.

The bidder that came in second has 273 bids on 269 items, 65% of which are with this seller. There were 2-3 other buyers with similar patters that I spotted in this wave of auctions, and none of them appeared to bid against each other from what I saw. I'm probably putting a bit too much thought into this, but it definitely struck me as odd. It may just be set builders going after what they need, but it doesn't seem entirely out of the question that this seller paid quite a decent coin for most of these years back, and didn't want to let them go at the prices many of the common players would end at today.

But like I said...I may be thinking this through a bit much.

 

[djrulz]

That seller sells tons of stuff and probably has a few loyal buyers of his stuff also.