Among other figures, eBay's auction action includes about five percent porn and other adult-oriented materials to the tune of an estimated $140 million - a successful enough nut to equal a single small successful adult auction Website. But the San Jose Net auction kings have a warning for porn and all auction bidders: don't bid unless you mean business, especially if you're playing for a $5,000-or-higher item.
Over the next few weeks, the auction site plans to introduce a policy requiring bidders to provide their credit card numbers if their offer is $5,000 or better for any item. In recent weeks, phony or prank bidding has become somewhat chronic - one notorious example having been a Porsche formerly owned by Minnesota governor and one-time brothel visitor Jesse (The Body) Ventura. A $43,300 bid on the car turned out to be a hoax. So did a $900,000 bid on a bed said to have belonged to Canada's prime minister. So did a $1 million bid on a millennium Net domain name.
"We think it will be another reminder, so someone will think twice before entering a bid above $5,000," eBay spokesperson Kevin Pursglove says. "Should they retract their bid or if it turns out to be a prank bid, we'll have another tool for identifying those individuals."
What began as a sideline in Pierre Omidyar's house in 1995 has turned into the number one cyberspace auction spot. Buyers reportedly handed over more than $900 million in 41 million auctions in the final quarter of 1999 alone. Most of the auctions are legitimate, but eBay has been e-burned recently by a number of high-visibility hoaxes.
For example, the two highest bids on Year2000.com offered by a Canadian Y2k specialist turned out to be pranks after the bidding hit a whopping $10 million, APBNews says. And in one case where the item for sale was slightly illegal - assuming it did exist - the crime news service says there were $10 million bids on 500 pounds of marijuana last September.
The auction site itself was subject of an auction hoax: a seller put eBay itself up for $1.25 starting bid the same month as the marijuana auction.
eBay already has a voluntary user program, ID Verify, which lets users tell those on the other side of a prospective deal that they're bidding on the up-and-up. The site also has a community watch feature which lets sellers and buyers alike report suspicious postings, and buyers and sellers alike can look up what others say about particular sellers or buyers before they make any auction moves.
The site started a requirement that new sellers give credit card numbers before putting items up for sale, and eBay says that caused a considerable fall in prank or fraudulent sales - such as one offer of a kidney for auction and another selling a soul.
