Quote from: SaltySpitoon on November 27, 2018, 09:51:42 PM

Quote from: Anduck on November 27, 2018, 08:50:32 PM

It's not dishonesty or scamming for auctioneer to bid on an auction. Many people agree with me on this, including theymos. This is also very normal in auction houses in Finland. Are they all unethical scammers?

When you place a bid, you are entering a legal contract to purchase an item at the price you have offered, . You can't enter a contract with yourself, so bids by yourself are void. It was a crime punished by execution in Rome (same as fractional reserve banking Tongue

) Ebay is a good source for information regarding auction fraud actually. Bidding on your own auctions is called shill bidding, and is a felony in the US, and Europe.

Of course, until there is a court case that proves me otherwise, I'd say that auctions done informally in a thread on a forum are honor bound at best. I doubt someone here could successfully press charges against someone for shill bidding, however my point is that its not something you can just brush off as a no big deal type of thing.

Shill bidding is bidding on the auction by using other people or accounts to drive the price up. Shill bidding is not the same as auctioneer bidding on the item. Ebay only talks about shill bidding, not self-bidding as self-bidding is not even possible on their platform. Shill bidding is a crime, yes, but self-bidding is not. Otherwise many auction houses in Europe would operate illegally.

Hope the difference between auctioneer bid and shill bid is now clarified. They're totally different things. First one is a type of concealed reserve price while the latter is dishonest activity to fake price up.