As I am in the market for a second Coupe i`m keeping a bit of an eye on Ebay and here.

There is a bidder active at the moment bidding on 6 Coupes, the activity doesn`t strike me as genuine. I can`t help wondering the purpose.
Is this person a seller of another Coupe perhaps? No bid retractions showing. Any ideas?

Probably one of the scrapers.

I just unleashed a poodle of war so eyes open to see how savage it turns out to be!

always aviod cars that attract a lot of early bidders....... people get their mates to bid on it to create interest early on,with no chance of having to pay for the car......you can spot these a mile off. Now looking for another motor on ebay , but the make and model will not be divulged on here as ridicule and pi@@taking will follow....

Hey now, n/a and vis owners don't get nearly the amount of crap they used to.

He`s after a Daewoo Lanos maybe?

I didn`t know what a scraper was but for some reason I googled for barnacle scraper - how did we live before the internet?

..............ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, .........no its not a daewoo ! Something more unreliable but better looking .

Coupe never had a movie part like the Lanos!

The bidder now in 7 Coupe auctions, as an LE has appeared.

One of the coupes on ebay is mine and I can promise you none of my friends has bud on it and it's had 45 bids in the first day

Barnacle would like it on the record that he does *not* require scraping.

I doubt any serious seller gets their friends to bid on their items.
Bidder 7***t (0% positive feedback), or Mr. 281 bids on 17 items, has got me quite curious. Despite a snoop today I can`t fathom any `connections` although I notice a pair of yellow cars from the same seller with no bids at all...which seems odd although they may be dogs as opposed to `the dogs`.

I think a barnacle only requires scraping once extremely plural, to save fuel I imagine.
Other than the obvious phrase I was also just making a new cable for the widget. However, I suppose I should confess I have a sneaking suspicion i`ve caught some disease from the cfc plate.

Only you could catch something nasty from carbon fibre, KBT...

................come on, you cannot be serious , of course some people create more interest by getting lots of bids in early , albeit smallish amounts that normally up the bidding by 20 quid a time [ ish ], thus creating the image that loads of people are interested or have viewed the car and are now creating a bidding frenzy .

With eBay, there are loads of problems, this is just one of them! Hahahahaha! You either take the punt or you don't. Sometimes it actually works out okay .... sometimes....

When I'm interested in something on eBay, I just bid the amount I want to pay and if I win - great

This is my serious face,

A serious seller seeks to control the entire market or as much of it as possible. This is not a person who sells the odd item, it is quite normal to have multiple buyer/seller ids.
I ran the top matching shop in one of my fields on ebay for about 3 years - I still have vast stock.
You couldn`t buy on ebay except from me after I got a hold on the market. I bought everything, filtered out the crap by soak testing, used factory packaging and achieved up to 1000% markup.
I was utterly ruthless, brutal even...I attacked the competition even when I didn`t need to. Eventually I got my own business model fired back at me, ebay changed some rules and I didn`t have the sense to just consider the resulting price hike my formerly free advertising fee. I stopped trading there.

I am a bit devious at times although it doesn`t sit well with me. Often things said or not and by whom can be revealing. I went to Sweden once and they have Herring in tomatoe sauce cold for breakfast.

My company sell on Ebay and have been for many years. Recently noticed items had attracted more interest and bidders then usual which dumped up the price. Once the auction was over the winner never contacted me so the item wasn't sold.

Noticed few days after my item went on someone listed the same item. My item had 10+ bids their item 2-4, and sold at the going rate. I believe they pushed up my price which then made their item look better value.

I've been buying and selling on Ebay for 6 or 7 years. I currently have 400+ 100% feedback. I have sold a few cars on Ebay as well and never had any issues.

This dark seedy underworld of people bidding up other peoples items sounds annoying, but if I end up with someone not paying I will just offer it to the next highest bidder until I find someone genuine.

I did this with a TV I sold where the winning bidder ignored me, Ebay has a function that allows you to report a non paying bidder and offer the item to the next highest bidder in 1 simple step. All the non-paying bidder did was delay my sale by a day, lose their Ebay account and mean that my price dropped £10 as that was the next highest bidders bid.

As a buyer of a car an auction can be a bit of a neurotic place to be, if you suffer from this as I do, some people are very calm about it.

If there are very few bids a seller is highly likely to end early for an offer which is very annoying for the bidders I think. The activity we can see may at the very least make sellers think things are going well, if they are not aware of the total activity across the board.

I was fishing, here is me 100% direct.

I think ebay can only compare ip addresses to spot connections. With the level of modern communication a connection can arise anywhere - I am having 4 virtual conversations hopefully discreet from the other right now. (except when I type in the wrong window of course)

Martin as I said in PM I hope you end up with more than you were asking, I look for a few small signs in pictures and decide about body state as to whether worth a serious look, parts can be replaced anyway and with the work you had done, MOT etc. the car could be worth more than you were asking especially to the belt savvy which isn`t me.

I mentioned my selling there because... well now you know it`s a hard world and we all need to make a living.
Ebay was supposed to be a place for people who had something to sell and other people who wanted to buy something. Then total parasites like me took over.
Now every high street shop and its guard dog have multiple accounts.

Ebay has improved things over the years for buyers which has been needed given the state of play but the current level of chaos is unlikely to ever be tamed and profits are up don`tyerknow!
I took the pain out of the buying process for customers. I only had 100% quality goods and first class service. I let one customer down in 3 years with a cpu somehow skipped soak. He had a double cache version delivered next day. Feedback still 100% after 11 years.
Forgot what this post was about now.
Oh yes, I think Facebook might be a good place for connections to form which might lead to what looks like some form of market collusion.