Well, I just wrote a long post and promptly 
accidentally erased it....I will try again!

For many people on this board, this may be their 
first personal experience in being shill bid. I 
agree with TK that it is very uncomfortable to 
talk about especially when the person in question 
is someone who has been active and friendly on 
this board, and who is probably truly an 
enthusiastic cel collector. 

But, shill bidding is not a light crime, it 
is theft, imho. Even without realizing it, anyone 
who participates in it has been stealing. Even if 
you thought that it was legal or that it just 
brought the prices of the cels up to their real 
value. There are other ways of insuring that you 
get the bids you are comfortable with.

For those that want more info on Shiling:
I took a look at the bidders lists of the two 
shillers, both are classic shill bidder patterns.
They both bid first on other sellers auctions 
(helps to appear more legit), before settling on 
only Womengem's auctions. In nearly all cases they 
bid early and low on the other sellers auctions, 
insuring (in all but one case) that they would not 
actually win. In the auctions by Womengem, they 
bid through the auctions in small amounts, and 
placed their final bid within several hours of the 
auctions closing, leaving time for snipers to take 
the auction...which is what shillers bank on. 
These patterns, along with low feedback (some 
shillers buy several small dollar items in order 
to get good feedback before they start shiling in 
ernest) and as was stated before, bidding on 
several unrelated items from a single seller. 
These are the best and easiest ways to discover a 
shiller. I have busted shill bidders quite a few 
times in my time on ebay, and have found that I 
had been shill bid, too. In one case (not cel 
related) I paid over sixty dollar more than I 
would probably have paid. It is VERY hurtful and 
angering to find out....as can be seen here.

For Joyka:
If it was me, even if I didn't know originally 
that I had done something wrong (which may be the 
case here, I don't know the age of the people 
involved but I suspect that there is underage 
auctioning going on here)...I would do what I had 
to do to make people feel better about having 
bought from me and to try to regain trust. In this 
case, I would return a portion of the payment to 
every single person who bought from me in an 
auction that was participated in by the shillers. 
Regarless of how many people bid on the auction 
or how high the bids went, I would go all the way 
down to the number below the first shill bid, and 
pay back the buyers the difference. Yes, you will 
lose a lot of money, and the cels will have sold 
for much less than you wanted to get....but I 
think that honesty and trust is the most important 
thing you can have in business or a hobby that you 
want to be involved in. There is a way to make 
ammends, but it is going to be expensive.

Joyka, even though you don't know me, if you would 
like me to help you go throught the auctions and 
come up with the amounts of money to return to 
people and try to work out any other problems, I 
would be happy to help. Just email me, I would 
like to do what I can to help you try to fix this 
and show you are sincere. This is about the most 
that anyone can do at this point, I think. I feel 
bad for everyone involved, all the way around. 

Kathleen