Expert: Marvinator - 1/29/2009

Question
Something just happened that gave me a bad feeling. I was browsing bike parts on ebay, came across something I wanted where there was maybe 4 hours left in the auction. The seller bragged about no reserve. There were no other bids. But after the auction ended, i saw that shortly before the auction end a bid had been made that was just a dollar short of my maximum. There was onr other bid for the item that was much earlier and was only for half my maximum amount. I checked and the bidder who was a dollar below my maximum had a history of bidding on this seller's items. It seemed there was a good chance this bidder was in cahoots with the seller, and I looked at what ebay had to say about that, but it looks like they don't get very agrressive in controlling this. They say it's illegal, but don't say much more-like, you can't submit a seller's name and ask that they be watched for a time-or can you? Of course i could be wrong, but I feel in my guts that i'm not. What would you do?

Answer
This is called "Shill Bidding" and is very frowned upon by Ebay.
http://pages.ebay.ca/help/policies/seller-shill-bidding.html

You can and should IMMEDIATELY report the seller for this infraction.

http://pages.ebay.ca/help/buy/report-trading.html