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A malicious bidder messing around with my listing

Someone has decided they want to really p me off and there is nothing I can do about it.

I have a listing that someone keeps placing stupid bids on - every time I cancel and block them they open a new account and do it again.

At least 20 times so far - only listed it last night - but this is on going.

 

We used to be able to stop people bidding with less than 10 feedback unless they made contact first - why has this option been taken away.

Seems like we have no protection from these kind of people

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red_magpie
Experienced Mentor

Wow! Someone is really determined to wreck your auction for the Land Rover. 8 separate bids, all near identical, from 8 apparently newly created accounts - all within 24 hours. There are two possible explanations for this.

 

The first is that this this is malicious bidding, aimed at you specifically. Only one of these members has placed a bid on any other item. However, there's no indication from your feedback record that you've had a bad transaction recently.

 

The second is that this was an attempt to win your Land Rover cheaply by bid shielding, in which someone invents new IDs to place fake bids on an item, high enough to deter anyone else from bidding. They then retract the other bids just before the auction ends, and place a real, much lower bid to win the item at a bargain price. This might explain why they kept on placing new bids every time you cancelled one.

 

If the second reason is true, the good news would be that they wanted the Land Rover, not to target you in particular. If reselling it, think about using a fixed price format, or classified ad, which stays in place until you've actually been paid.

 

It's frustrating that eBay has removed the previous option to block bids from buyers without a PayPal account. This was the most effective way to stop people from casually opening accounts with a false name and address.

 

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