Fraudulent Bidding on E-Bay

An in-depth investigation by an Australian retiree has revealed that fake bids are "running rampant" on eBay, forcing users to pay inflated prices for items on the auction site. Philip Cohen, 69, from Brighton-Le-Sands in Sydney, found several instances of 'shill' bidding - where phoney eBay accounts are used to bid up the price of items on the auction site to inflate the final price paid by buyers.

He places the blame squarely on eBay, saying that its anti-shill security systems are flawed or non-existent. He says that shill bidding has been encouraged by a new policy from eBay to hide from other users the usernames of people bidding on items.

Cohen's 8,000 word analysis was published on eBay's message board and the AuctionBytes website, but it has been inexplicably deleted from the former.

• To read the Sydney Morning Herald article, click here.
• To read the full study on AuctionBytes, click here.