Luke W.

If you want to win an auction, there is a good chance you will have to outbid a fake bidder, public surplus employee, or another shill bidder just trying to increase the price for the profit of public surplus or the seller. It worsened years ago when public surplus started hiding the bidder names with asterisks and has worsened again now that all bid history for an item has been hidden. Be wary of using autobids now that public surplus can just increase the "bid" because you can't even see if another person is bidding against you if you retained the max bid. If you lose a listing, there is probably a 50-50 chance or more that it will get relisted because the winning "bidder" or public surplus/seller employee does not pay. If you do win, you will probably have to overpay and will be bidding against that same "bidder" that did not pay the last time it was posted. Now that you can't check the history, the employees don't need to invent new bidder names to shill bid. Next step is to hide the winning bidders name, so you can't even tell if you are winning and can run yourself up. This has become the worst online bidding platform.