Those of you that are not already aware, should understand that even the high end auction houses are quite happy to shill bid you up to at least the reserve on any item, if not even past the maximum you are prepared to pay (if they are selling their own stuff, undisclosed, of course); for some funny reason many auctioneers simply don't consider such activity to be really criminal, but just the traditional way of doing business.
It is indeed naïve to presume otherwise of any auctioneer because you just dont know.
It seems to many people, even the wealthy and the prominent, fraud is OK (prominent examples abound in the US), as long as they dont get caught. Which brings to mind one situation that was exposed in Australia many years ago at a GM new car dealership named Tony Packard Holden; the salesman would leave the deal room so that prospective buyers (eg, husband and wife) could have a discussion between themselves as to just how much they could afford; the dealer had bugged this office and the salesman could listen in to the conversation so that he knew what to offer to make the sale and maximize his profit on the deal. Needless to say, one day someone blew the whistle on this activity. The court decided that that gave Tony a decidedly unfair advantage and I think he actually spent some time as a guest of the government over the matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Packard
What then is the difference between this car dealers actionsafter all he was only trying to ascertain the absolute maximum the potential buyers were prepared to payand the making of undisclosed vendor bids on an auction, the only purpose of which are to give potential buyers the impression that there is other genuine interest in the item, when there may well not be any, and to artificially increase the selling price?
Respectfully, it is indeed naïve to assume that commercial operators are scrupulous in such circumstances; indeed, unscrupulous auctioneers, including eBay, rely heavily on such naivety
