The Energon Pub

Hi everyone,

I hope I am posting in the appropriate section of this forum (if not, let me know and I'll move this post asap).

I am currently experiencing a problem with this ebay seller (oftimespast). Although my issue does not concern Transformers specifically (it actually concerns Robo Machines/Gobots), this seller has many Transformers listed, so I decided to share my experience to warn you that you have to be very careful when bidding on his items.

In short, I have been the victim of shill bids on 3 items I purchased from this seller, and I basically ended up paying a lot of extra money for these toys.

The long story now :
This seller has listed a few days ago many Japanese Robo Machines that are valuable to collectors like me. The listings ended last friday and I noticed that the same day, a profile (with only 1 evaluation) was bidding on every Robo Machine listed by oftimespast. In most cases, that would be highly suspect, and I am very cautious, but the seller has more than 187 000 (!) positive evaluations, and a 99,8% rating profile, so I assumed that this bidder was just a new player in the Robo Machine collection field.

I decided to bid on every Robo Machine listings I was interested in with my maximal bid (120$), and ended up losing most of them to the bidder mentioned above. I only got 3 of them for which I decided to go beyond my 120$ limit (and won against this same bidder).

So far so good, I got my 3 items for a significantly high price but I was happy. I paid. (on a side note, the seller invoiced me higher combined shipping costs than the one discussed before the end of the listings. I tried to contact him about it but he never replied. It was a few bucks, so I didn't insist as it was marginal in regards to the overall price).

And yesterday I received a second chance offer at my highest bid price (120$), for 11 of the Robo Machines I "missed"...

So you can probably see where this is going : there was a fake bidder artficially inflating bidding prices, and I ended up paying more than 360$ for these 3 toys. Funny thing, if I remove all the fake biddings on my items, the maximal biddings went down to less than 150$ for the three toys... What would have been the real market price if this fake bidder did not bid ? Nobody knows for sure, but somewhere between 150 and 360$, which is a huge range...

In any case, I immediately contacted the seller to tell him that I highly suspect a fraud. We have been exchanging messages since yesterday, but he basically stands in the position that he is the victim, complaining because he is wasting time to relist the items, because he paid the seller's fees to ebay but never get the money from the fake bidder and so on. At some point he even found "suspicious" that I bid more or less at the the same time as the fake bidder (was he suggesting that I used a secondary account to bid over my own bids just for the sake of paying extra money for my toys ?).

So far, he didn't offer any satisfactory solution to my case (at some point he proposed to send back the items to get a refund, but of course shipping costs being at my charge, so in any case, I am the one who is losing money here). And exchanging with him is excruciatingly painful, as he is victimizing himself, and doesn't acknowledge the real issue.

I will not give my personal judgement on this seller. Just consider these facts : he said to me that he is not the one who artificially inflated the prices of his listings. Yet, he is the sole benefitor of the situation, and, although he knew that a fake bidder inflated his prices, he purposedly sent me second chances offers that were also inflated. I am still waiting an explanation about this behavior, as he deliberately tried to get more money from me with aldedgedly artificially inflated listings.

I have a copy of our exchanges that I am willing to copy-paste here, but I don't know if it is legal to do so without the consent of my interlocutor. If it is, I can post our messages here as additinal facts supporting this problem.

So beware, I have a bad experience with this seller, and despite that facts are proving I am a victim of shill bids, I have no satisfactory issue with him so far (his last reply was "see with ebay"...).

As an additional information, oftimespast is "the on-line store for the Time Capsule. Located at 537 Pontiac Ave in Cranston RI, we specialize in comic books, toys, records, video games & other collectibles." (this is an excerpt from his publicly available ebay introduction, no personal informations here).

Cheers