At 1:07 AM -0400 4/10/01, you etched in electrons:

>I had lost the item in the morning. Imagine my surprise when I was now the
>high bid! The main bidder had been disqualified for some reason, after running
>the price up. Conveniently, there was one bid from a third bidder that locked
>mine in at the high end of my proxy bid.

You may have been the victim of shill bidding, which is the practice
of illegally bidding in your own auction for the sole purpose of
raising the price. This scam is carried out by entering a
ridiculously high bid for the item in order to drive up the price of
the auction (by driving proxy bids to the max). At the last minute,
the bogus bid is retracted, leaving the legitimate buyer with a huge
bill. DO NOT pay for the item. Report this to eBay immediately.

I've been lucky so far, though one item I bought (a space shuttle
Transformer for my space shuttle model collection) came missing a
part, which wasn't mentioned in the auction but discovered on
unpacking. I emailed the seller about it, but lo and behold, he
wasn't answering his mail anymore, when he had previously. Gotta love
that... So I paid a bit more money for one (different seller) that
was in shoddy condition, removed the missing part from the clunker,
and installed it on the good one. It cost me a bit extra, but I now
have a complete one for my collection. Still, watch out for stuff
like that.
--

-----

Jennifer - ncc876@yahoo.com
... knee-deep in the hoopla ...

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