The censoring system on the BBS is wacked I think ... It just lopped off a huge amount of my comment. Oh well.

So I'm bidding on a laptop, and it's running a good $400 under retail near the end. Suddenly an eBay user with 0 history that is like two days old runs my bid up and it ends up at my max bid. Then another user that is older but only has two purchases ever (in over a year of existence) bids another $25, becoming the highest bidder, then within less than a minute retracts his bid (with the reason of "unable to contact seller" -- a retraction in less than a minute for that??). It could be totally innocent, but it certainly seems pretty darn suspicious. Fortunately someone legitimately outbid me -- I was glad to be out of it ... Last thing I want is a seller that might be pulling some crap receiving $1600 of my money. I just don't know that the risk of eBay is worth the payoff for big ticket items. How frustrating. For as popular as eBay is, it really is a lame system ... It could be so much better.