More fun with eBay ice-holes...

eBay, eBay, eBay.  What a great place you used to be.

An acquaintance is currently going through problems similar to some I experienced not long back when I had an item up for auction -- non-existent bidders, or bids from people that have apparently had their accounts hi-jacked.  That acquaintance is currently auctioning an item that should be valued at approximately $300 but is showing bids of 10 times that amount.  It is obvious that these bids are a joke and not something that would ever be honored, but the idiots behind the bids are bidding up the items to make the auction worthless for the seller.

What is it with idiots that they have to ruin things for everyone else?

More to the point though, why is it that eBay -- which has been increasingly plagued with problems like this -- hasn't implemented fixes to their system that would weed out these problems??

Something I've suggested in the past is that eBay should force all new account holders to put a credit card on file or use PayPal to setup a *verified* account that is backed with at least $50.00 in funding before letting that new account be used for placing bids.  If eBay did that a lot of these created-on-the-fly new accounts would never exist, and a lot of the shill bidding that comes from them wouldn't exist either.  Anyone that wanted to use eBay and didn't have a feedback rating of at least 10 positives without a negative would be on the hook to have up to $50 take from their bank account, credit card, or whatever to be used as collateral in case of a dishonored bid.

Meanwhile the problems with the hi-jacked accounts is a different story.  People that have used poor passwords, or who have fallen for the phishing attempts from some places and wound up losing their eBay accounts because they haven't changed passwords or worked with eBay to resolve the problems are contributing to the problems.  These old accounts never get closed and wind up being fair game for hackers to find and make trouble with.  eBay could and should disable old accounts and require a bit of effort from users that aren't placing bids or selling items at least once every 90 days.  Doing something like that would help protect users on both ends and keep problems minimized.

eBay used to be a fine place to do business, but as usual azz-hats and morons have come forth to try to ruin the experience for the legitimate people out there.