There is also the possibility that the seller is playing games with shill bidders who really don’t exist but are fake bidders invented by the seller. I am not accusing anyone of this, but let’s just say that it happens. It could be that the seller was trying to feel out the high bidder and push him up to his highest bid and then tried to get him to bid one more time. Or, the shill bidder had no intention of selling the CT36 this time and wanted to find out what it would bring (the answer is $467).
Let’s follow the bids. (I haven't double checked all my times and prices here) There were eight real bids up through May-20-11 08:52:24 PDT.
On May 20 the high bid was $150 or one bid above that, but bidder 7***9 (143) had bid $155.99. At 22:53 PDT real bidder o***y (105) put in two bids, one for $460 and one for $467, which was probably his high bid. Since the previous bid was $155.99, his bid probably looked like $162 or something close to that to the rest of the world. Perhaps the $460 bid was there so that he would see when other bidders went above $460 and by how much.
Real bidder t***l (24) put in four bids on May 21 and May 22 bidding up to $350 but still couldn’t outbid 7***9 (143) whose bid now was one bid increment over $350.
The auction was due to close at 05:06 early the morning of May 24 and the seller may have wanted more than $350 for the CT36. On May 23 he could have invented new bidder e**6(0) who had never bought anything on eBay and started bidding. His first two bids of $360 and $387 pushed up the auction value but still did not outbid the high bidder. As soon as the bids exceeded the high bidder’s bid of $467 he waited for the high bidder to bid more, but he didn’t. Perhaps the seller only wanted to see how much the CT36 would bring as the next shill bid entered at May-23-11 09:40:01 PDT was almost $10,000. He also invented bidder i***t(0) who had never won an auction and put in a series of bids to fill in the large gap between his $477 and $9,899 bids.
There appears to be nothing accidental here. If I cared about buying from this seller, I would now look at the bidding history for his other live and completed auctions.
This could be a game I’ve seen played quite often on eBay. I now only bid at the end of the auction and if I see that shill bidders have bid up an auction, I don’t bid. I have also noticed that the same seller often has a number of shill bids on different items, so I choose to believe that it is the seller playing games. On most occasions the shill bids fill in the gap between a fairly low second highest bidder and the highest bidder. Some time ago I won an auction for my high bid only because shill bidders pushed my bid up by several hundred dollars, so I contacted eBay to invalidate the auction.
Not every seller is honest and not every person who gets an item for a very high price ever expected the auction to go that high.