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1. 

   Anonymous Coward, 10 May 2000 @ 12:24pm

   
   

   Not Surprised In The Least

   That's probably not all this guy's up to -- I wouldn't be surprised if he's shill bidding on his own auctions. I haven't been able to see any clear pattern of that, but in addition to the two eBay names the news article mentions, a third "w." pulls its images from the same pacbell.net account.
   

   
   And he's trying to finance his law practice. Doesn't that figure?

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2. 

   Ed, 10 May 2000 @ 3:07pm

   
   

   Update

   The id used to list the painting in question (golfpoorly) has been NARU'd by eBay, as has the other one mentioned in the NYT article (advice) and the one mentioned here (w.). So it seems that eBay is making an effort to keep deceptive users off its system and they should be commended for that.
   
   However, I can't recall a single high-profile, big-ticket eBay auction that wasn't either turned into a circus or failed to live up to the hype. A charity auction for a BMW X5 had something like four times as many prank bids as real ones. All of the winning bids for Peter de Yager's Y2K domain name turned out to be bogus. In both cases bid amounts made headlines before they were discovered to be bogus. Now this, and I'm not even counting the obvious absurdities like Elian's raft. eBay has done very well for itself and its "community" with small, cheap items, but this virtually anonymous person-to-person model just isn't working for expensive items.

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