I have a section devoted to Shill bidding in my book. It details the rise of " Certain members of Scambay ", and how eBay has changed it's policy to aid shill bidding. It also details how each manipulation of the auctions system is designed to enhance the act of shill bidding, and hides the identity of those who do it for a living.
In my opinion, ebay, who's US staff were found guilty in court of registering shilling id's and using for the practice, outsourced this profitable arm of it's business.
The site many of us suspect of winning the contract to operate this, is a US registered company, and upon investigation, found it to be a Wholesale Beauty and Cosmetic Company in California US. In an attempt to get the details of the Directors, for a trace, I reported it to the members on one of my forums.
Within a few days, the Domain was moved to another registrant company and they were paid to hide ownership details.
With domain registrations you can pay around $110 US, to have your details hidden and whois will only show the registrant holders name.
We had to end the research there and then because a company trace of US records showed it was merely a dot com company. I can only assume that ebay would have to pay payments to this site I mention and what better way to do it.
I also believe this site probably operates live world, in conjunction with ebay, which would explain why many of us have to rely on a forum like this, having been banned from ebay's boards. It would explain how this site gets it's information, while pretending to hate ebay. I assume such a site would come in very handy for peeps to go and air their suspicions.
I would suggest rather than look at who a site like this would name as crooks etc; look at who they don't name. You would probably notice that those that everyone used to see, as being habitual shill bidders, never get a mention.
Now you would also think that some power sellers would pay for such a site to use their shill bidding services because it can never be traced back to them.
The people who own the site would be very skilled at registering ID's through proxy servers, using details from people they have purchased from and who have been added to their data base.
No company in the history of the internet can claim to having one quarter of a countries population as it's members, yet ebay does. It is my opinion that ebays membership is less than 1.5 million genuine members.
As this is just my opinion, and not an accusation, I would welcome others opinions on whether my opinion has merit.
A shill bid of just $5.00 per sale on Ebay, amounts to millions per week in FVF's so you can see why such as joint venture would be worthwhile. You could perhaps also see why some of the players in that game would want to keep cleansing the forums of anyone who remotely hints at whats going on, or who they think may be trouble in the future. Especially those who joined the rebellion.
You could also see why some of those people would join a site like OZtion to screw the site, gain as many details as possible, because quite simply, those I have encountered on a site like this would be, are multi lingual, which would lead me to assume that this is a world wide event.
OK, I'll go and take my pills now
