Its a very prevalent practice in Australian real estate auctions. They are
called "vendor bids" or "dummy bids" and are perfectly legal
although considerably controversial.
At 10:34 PM Thursday 9/08/2001, you wrote:
A shill bidder is one who is in league with a seller. The shill bidder(s)
bid to drive up the price and intice reputable bidders to enter the
competitive bidding for a supposedly "valuable" item. It's a very old
real-life auction technique used by people selling poor quality, faked, or
counterfit antiques to drive up the price and suck in inexperienced buyers.
If the technique backfires and one of the shill bidders actually wins the
auction, the seller simply pays himself and writes off any auction fees
and commissions as a cost of doing "business".
Skip
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