Raising the bid to a tie and then stop bidding.

Auctions on Yahoo Japan
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Animechaos
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Re: Raising the bid to a tie and then stop bidding.

Post by Animechaos »

Think we found the reason for the correlation. We knew this shill bidder had multiple ID's, but it seems they only use certain ID's against specific users. Pretty sure this "pol" person is the same:
http://page2.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/b148263838
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theultimatebrucelee
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Re: Raising the bid to a tie and then stop bidding.

Post by theultimatebrucelee »

Thanks for pointing out your experience sensei, that would have never been known otherwise. I've seen other auctions that got hit by "hug" from last month or so, but no one posted here so I assumed they either didn't see this thread, didn't check the bid log, didn't want to call public attention or simply didn't care. But If this is not a big problem as it should have been(more than a few people is losing money here) then no action will ever be taken, and loyal proxy users will get hit eventually, or again and again.

Hey Nick, no disrespect here, just want to make this post objective as possible.
Animechaos wrote:
But spending a couple hours checking logs from year-to-date, a random sample and multiple sellers, I found something pretty curious.....

1) Only happens with cel/sketch auctions.
This is efinitely not the case, hug does not only hit cel/sketch auctions, I think I've mentioned this before. Here are some examples:

http://page2.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/b142073994 Video game circuit board
http://page3.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/c411535051 Car molding
http://page16.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/u50976392 Concert tickets
http://page16.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/u50296233 Anime CD
3) ....and this might be the oddest or most worrisome one...but I'm pretty certain that the bids from this "hug***" individual.....are all against Anime-Beta members. I can't find a single instance where "hug***" has bid on an item where a non-beta member was involved. I could be wrong considering I just took a random sample, and have not gone through thousands of auctions, but I find that incredibly strange and hope it's not the case. We'll have multiple bids on multiple items from the same seller over the course of months, and only a few are bid up, all that I can relate to a Beta member.


Well, unless A-B users also bid on concert tickets or car molding, this would most likely not be the case.
Think we found the reason for the correlation. We knew this shill bidder had multiple ID's, but it seems they only use certain ID's against specific users. Pretty sure this "pol" person is the same:
http://page2.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/b148263838
This "pol" guy is a legit bidder. Unlike hug, I've bid against him in the past times and again, since awhile back. On the bid wars, he usually win over me in the end. This "hug" on the other hand didn't appear on this particular title until less than 2 months ago, and my exp is the same as sensei's, when hug's bid appears, it appears either right after my pending snipe bid kicks in, or immediately after I placed manual bid at around the end of auction.

If you look at this log here: http://pageinfo4.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/j ... 83&typ=log

"pol" spent nearly half an hour to bid against "cha" and manually placed bid 6 times in process, and never once hit the "max bid" of "cha" nearly as accurate as our shiller "hug". While "hug" on the other hand, placed bid only once, at the very end of auction right after"cha" bid kicked in, and with this one bid, he maxed out "cha". Then "pol" outbid "cha" in the end and won. "pol" is definitely not a shiller here. If there's doubt on that, I can show you quite a bit of auctions where "cha" and "hug" is simply not involved and "pol" still won the auctions. So in short, "pol" being a shiller is pretty out of question, because it wins most of the auctions it bids on.

"hug" on the other hand, I have never seen it appear in one single auction where its pronounced the winner. At the end of auction, its always below "cha" and never above it and it only places one single bid per auction, and is almost always right after "cha" bid gets placed. And that one single bid just so happens to almost always max out "cha" bid at the time. And this exact problem happened over and over again with different auctions by different sellers. But how does "hug" always figure out 'cha's max bid so accurately? I can only imagine, the same way as the person sensei mentioned in his post, that either someone inside the proxy happens to own or use this "hug" ID, or the bid amounts is being leaked out.

In the end, I hope more serious actions can be taken against this "hug" shiller on SMJ side. I have not seen any other "assumed shiller" do such a clean or direct job as this "hug" does all the time. Maybe someone else can prove me wrong on that? And does anyone know, if there is any real way to get this ID out of Yahoo Japan? Or do nothing and just let it keep on shilling? I can settle for this too, because I'll be honest, I've used SMJ still in the past one month and have not gotten hit by "hug", so I'm not losing money on it, currently. Also I have mixed feeling about investigating this further because I usually have a very positive feeling about SMJ as a proxy, before this "hug" appeared.
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Animechaos
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Re: Raising the bid to a tie and then stop bidding.

Post by Animechaos »

That info actually helps more than you know.

We use multiple ID's on YHJ. But every single one linked in this thread is contained to a single ID. They're not "stalking" SMJ...but just that one account for some reason. I haz a plan!
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