Bidding site like eBay?

Is the same eBay anonymous name used for all the auctions in which the bidder participates?

• From the eBay website: "To keep eBay a safe place for buyers, member-specific information is not displayed. Each bidder is assigned an anonymous name, that is used consistently throughout the bid history for an item." To be clear in my intentions - I do not want to make eBay an unsafe place. I am simply a very curious guy, and I would like to know if bidders always are given the same anonymous name for every auction in which they participate. I've gone through my buying/bidding history and for every item I checked, I was given the same "anonymous" name. But since this is a small (~100) sample, I don't want to draw any premature conclusions from the results. There is an obvious problem in the logic of my question that I'll address before posting the question. That is; the anonymous names given are too short to guarantee a unique name for each bidder in the auction. But I see that as a special case that could be dealt with in many ways, including eBay giving more than one user the same anon name (eBay doesn't say the names are unique) or giving the bidder a different name if their "usual" one is already used in an auction in which they make a bid. That second name could be reused in future auctions where the 1st anon name was already used, causing my question to become something along the lines of, "Are the same set of eBay bidder names used for all the auctions in which a bidder participates?" eBay anonymous bidders: [Edit] i found this additional information on the eBay site. It does not answer the question, but may be of interest to someone reading this. "On http://eBay.ie, the anonymous names will use two random characters from the User ID, with three asterisks in between, e.g. 'x***y'. The bidder's actual Feedback score will be shown, and the masked ID is consistent for that bidder across all auctions."

• Answer:

  Yes, a buyer's bidding ID is consistent across all auctions. Regardless, eBay only further anonymised bidding with non-unique IDs in 2008 to further obfuscate the endemic shill bidding fraud that it can be demonstrated eBay calculatingly facilitate on their auctions ... http://bit.ly/11F2eas