Ebay scramble board

[TNTtoys]

Guys,

We are all familiar with ebay's system of "scrambling" the names of bidders of auctions, but how do they in fact do it?

My assumption all along was the following:

They take 2 random letters out of your ebay ID.
They then create a 5-letter name out of the first of these 2 random letters, "***", and then the second of these 2 random letters.

Well, my theory has just been proven wrong. Anyone know the exact method to their madness? Or is there a posted link to their actual scrambling routine?

Thanks
Nick

[joelsabi]

Guys,

We are all familiar with ebay's system of "scrambling" the names of bidders of auctions, but how do they in fact do it?

My assumption all along was the following:

They take 2 random letters out of your ebay ID.
They then create a 5-letter name out of the first of these 2 random letters, "***", and then the second of these 2 random letters.

Well, my theory has just been proven wrong. Anyone know the exact method to their madness? Or is there a posted link to their actual scrambling routine?

Thanks
Nick

what are you trying to get?

the ebayid of the user who is possibly shilling or the ebayid of the user who won an item that you want that was sold?

[TNTtoys]

None of the above. Just a better understanding of the algorithm. I have recently seen a case which didn't comply to the format I was familiar with.

[cohibasmoker]

Last night, I was going to bid on two (2) items - both were offered by the same seller. As the auction wound down to the final five minutes on the first item, something interesting started to happen. All of a sudden, a bidder appeared and placed a bid, not high enough to be the high bidder but just enough to raise the bar. A few moments later, another bid was placed then another, then another. All the while, the bids were not quite high enough to be the high bidder but enough to get the price higher and higher. When the auction ended, the bidder who pushed the price did NOT win the item.

About 20 minutes later, the second item was winding down. Again, the same scenario. As the auction wound down, here comes the bids again with the same MO as in the first auction. When the auction ended, the bidder did NOT win the item but simply pushed the price higher and higher.

In checking both auctions, even though the ID's are scrambled, it appears that eBay assigns the same encoded ID to the same bidder. In the end, the bidder did not win anything but they did succeed in pushing the auction prices and if the bidder had NOT placed their bids, the final price for both items would have been about half of what the final price should have been.

Do I care? Absolutely NOT. It was however very interesting watching the prices getting pushed higher and higher and in the end, when I compared the bid history of both auctions, I found that our "mystery" bidder didn't win anything but has taken the time in 100% of the seller's auctions.

Of well, that's eBay. Tomorrow is another day and I am sure something else will come along.

Just my thoughts,

Jim

flaa1a@comcast.net