You are bidding on an item and notice that the bid goes higher and higher. In the fever of the moment you keep outbidding the next bid until the end when you finally win the auction. You have won the auction, but there is one problem: you have ended up paying more for the item than you originally wanted to and in fact thought wise to. But where did all these bids come in when there was so little activity during the bidding process until the final moments. Answer: Shills

Shilling is the practice of the sellers and their partners bidding the price of an item higher so that the ultimate buyer ends up paying for the item at a higher price than he or she would otherwise have but for the actions of the partners. It is an unscrupulous practice that should have no place in the auction world but in fact is a small part of the very fabric of auctions. To assist you in possibly spotting the shill and to avoid being a victim we have set out below some suggestions.

Research the Seller

In preparing yourself to safeguard yourself against a shill, understand that a seller can either through the use of friends or by himself can engage in shilling. Using friends is self-explanatory. The seller can also create multiple user names and post competing bids to inflate the bid and create the impression that separate buyers are doing the bidding. To obtain multiple user names, sellers can create multiple accounts with their internet service providers (ISP) and then obtain different user names from an online auction.

To determine whether a seller could be using multiple user names, ascertain whether the seller's and the shills are from the same ISP domain. To do this look at their email addresses. Look at the seller's and the shill's auction listings to see if the same style of description is being used. Are their policies of sale the same? Are the images used to advertise an item being hosted at the same ISP? To determine the ISP hosting the photo, right-click on the image itself and select Properties if you are using Internet Explorer or select View Image if you are using Netscape Navigator. In either case a window will open displaying the host URL of the image. This will not provide definitive proof but at least you can start adding the pieces to the puzzle to form an impression of whether or not shilling is being done.