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When you put in a maximum bid eBay is then acting as your buying agent. One technique of shill bidding is that the seller will coordinate two shill bidders in order to expose your maximum bid and lock it in. When eBay refuses to police that, or to invalidate all bids that were made after the "discovery shill bidder" enters, eBay is then acting to HELP defraud you, and is acting incompetently in your behalf as a buying agent.

For one recent example: two weeks ago I entered a max bid of say, $747, for a laptop in the morning before leaving for work. At that time the bids were $510 or so. The auction finished just before noon.

What I discovered after the auction was that a shill bidder had entered a shill maximum bid of $7000 (a huge amount that made the shill obvious) two hour before the auction went off. The shill removed his bid 30 minutes prior to the auction going off. But in that hour and a half the shill was the nominal winner for an automatic bid of $757 -- and the seller had 90 minutes to see that someone (me) had a bid just below that.

Badda bing. Two minutes after the high-bidding shill removes his bid, a new bidder, out of the woodwork enters the bidding. He bids $735, almost exactly one ten dollar bid increment under my now-discovered maximum.

Cha-ching! I'm now the mark and hit up for my maximum bid.

I refused to pay and filed multiple complaints. Eventually the seller (a 100% 71 feedback fellow) offered up a dispute resolution to hold both of us harmless. I accepted, but eBay was NO HELP -- they "investigaed" twice they said and found no evidence of a relationship between the seller and the shills. Oh yeah. Right.