Yet another reason to be cautious with Ebay...

TimeOnline has a rather lengthy article on the practice of shill bidding on ebay. Shill bidding is when a seller (and/or the seller's buddies) bids on their own merchandise. It is happening, apparently, increasingly often...and is made harder to detect by ebay's recent move to "conceal" the identity of bidders when the bids go above a certain point. The punchline, of course, is that ebay has absolutely no impetus to actually stop this practice as they profit from it. For every potential buyer (like me) that either reduces or stops using the site, there are plenty of others who either do not know or do not care...

ASW Rosenbach said (paraphrased), "If you want to avoid fraud, deal with a reputable bookdealer." (Books and Bidders, 1926). This is not to say that there are not some excellent dealers who sell on ebay. Hugh Hollowell, for example, is a great advocate of the venue...I only wish his method/style of selling was the dominant form. There are good dealers selling there...and there are certainly books to be found...but caveat emptor has never been so true. While I loved ebay during its first year or two...the signal to noise ratio long ago became so skewed I approach any transaction there with a very skeptical eye. Now we can add shill bidding to the list of things to fret about...