Apology to Asuman Kilich
Turkish born Sydney woman, 55 year old Asuman Kilich, undoubtedly has her troubles. She didn't need me adding to them and for that I sincerely apologize.
Earlier today I published a story, by email and on the web, alleging, that, from my personal experience, she was shilling eBay auctions, using multiple identities.
The story was wrong. It is already, and rightly, seeing eCommerce Report lampooned on discussion boards at eBay.
http://forums.ebay.com.au/thread.jspa?threadID=600114472&tstart=0&mod=1237460225910
Even though I've taken the story down, and replaced it with this one as soon as possible, I know that it will ever remain on the Internet, in some dark corner somewhere.
So I owe Ms Kilich this public apology. And both she, and readers, deserve an explanation.
And for those others who have missed the recent eBay rule change on bidder identities, here is a simple outline of the situation as described in one of the number of emails I received on this subject.
"I thought I should bring to your attention, the fact that Ebay introduced 'Hidden Bidders' some time ago.
Every person who bids on Ebay now, has their full user id changed to display the first and last characters only, the rest of the id is displayed as asterisks.
The person who is bidding can see their own id in full, but they cannot see the other bidders' id's in full.
Ebay introduced this system to tackle the problem of fake second chance offers.
Unscrupulous people would watch and wait for a bidder to lose an auction item and then send that bidder a fake second chance offer to purchase it.
The bidder would take up the offer, pay money and never receive an item.
The problem with the hidden bidder system at present though, is that Ebay did not educate users prior to its introduction, therefore,
they created an environment of distrust because buyers suspected shill bidding when they saw these strange id's full of asterisks."
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