Stopping outside deals is one of the side effects of the Safeguarding
Members Id's policy but it is not the publicly disclosed reason. The main
intention is to stop scammers from making fraudulent Second Chance Offers.
These fake offers are often the target of high value items which is one of
the reasons the identity hiding only kicks in when the bidding reaches $200.
The side effects do include a potential for shill bidding to be easier to
hide (the primary policing on eBay is done by other members, reps from IP
owners and NOT eBay's staff). As you point out it does remove the ability of
other sellers to make genuine offers to underbidders. But eBay has already
tried to stop this type of off eBay sales by introducing the Second Chance
Offer system in the first place. Though only the original seller of the item
has access to make this offer to his underbidders. When it works the SCO
system is a good deal for the seller as you don't get charged a listing fee,
only a final value fee if the second item sells. The trust in the SCO system
has been almost totally removed by the fraudulent SCO emails that magically
arrive somehow (for now I will ignore the gigantic question on how the
scammers get peoples direct emails which are *supposed* to be hidden from
everyone until a deal is struck).
I would expect that in the next 18 months eBay will move to stop all email
communication between buyers and sellers and fully switch to their My eBay
Messaging system. Currently with the doubling of it and regular email there
is a hole that is being exploited by many scams. When and if this occurs
people will be able to say for certain if they get an email that says
anything about eBay it will either be SPAM or fraud.
Sorry for the ramble, Dan S.
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Ali Shah
Subject: [OM] Re: What the $%#$%# is this?
This is something I just noticed. Turns out that you can see the winning
bidder and yourself once the auction ends. I guess Ebay is trying to control
people from contacting each other so that they dont strike deals outside of
the system.
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