Anxiety set in for a sports card collector when the price of the cards he consigned for sale on Alt, a prominent online auction house and marketplace for trading cards, seemed destined to fall well short of their appraised values with one day remaining on the auction. Fearing such a scenario, the consignor, a middle-aged man who had never sold a card through an auction house, had asked an Alt employee via text messages about a plan in which his brother would bid on the cards.
This would be a textbook case of “shill bidding,” which is when an individual places bids on an item in order to manipulate its price, desirability or perceived value to either benefit themselves or a consignor.
“My brother depending on the auction price, was interested in the vini (an Adam Vinatieri 2025 Donruss Optic Downtown Gold insert card with a PSA 10 grade),” the consignor sent on Nov. 3, 2025 in a text conversation with the Alt representative, which was reviewed by The Athletic. “I told him idk (I don’t know) if that’s allowed or not for him to bid on the card and that I’d ask.”
The consignor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the potential legal jeopardy, told The Athletic that at the time, he didn’t know much about shill bidding. But an account manager from Alt, which launched in March 2021, answered, “As long as the item is paid we have no problem with whoever bids,” the Alt employee wrote back.
“Apart from myself (I’m) assuming?” the consignor asked.
“If you won your own card and it was paid, (it) wouldn’t be a problem either. “If (you’re) bidding it up with no intent to pay, they would have a problem. Haha,” the Alt employee responded.
With this, both Alt and the consignor were entering questionable territory related to the company’s policy on shill bidding, which prohibits “any action that manipulates, or is intended to manipulate, the pricing or fair market value of any Assets or other items (including, without limitation, placing any bids to artificially raise prices or enhance market desirability, commonly known as ‘shill bidding’), or (placing) offers or bids on any Assets or other items on behalf of others.”
Often difficult to prove conclusively, shill bidding is a common suspicion in the collectibles world, where recent auction prices are used to determine current value. Bad actors can use shill bidding to artificially inflate valuations of individual items and get unwitting buyers to pay more than true market value. This can have a domino effect that impacts more and more buyers and sellers, as those manipulated values are used to determine each successive sale of a given card type.
The consignor told The Athletic he then signed his brother up for an Alt account, using the same phone number and email address for his brother’s account that he used for his own.
In the final hours of the auction, the consignor sent a message to the Alt employee: “Yeah I just spoke with my brother and told him he will not be paying for the cards if he wins …”
The auctions of the Vinatieri card, and several others Alt sold for the consignor, finished with the brother winning. The consignor sent the Alt employee another message a few hours after the auctions closed saying his brother wouldn’t be paying and the consignor wanted to chat about other options. The Alt employee responded with a thumbs up emoji.
Alt provided a statement to The Athletic: “The facts are that: the customer and brother involved in this matter were banned after admitting in writing that bids were placed with no intent to pay; a junior employee early in his tenure gave a response inconsistent with our policy and the issue was addressed internally; and Alt maintains a 98% payment rate across all auctions, the highest in the industry.”
The Athletic has confirmed that the Alt junior employee still works for the company.
“I did regret doing this. truthfully,” the consignor said. “I felt like such an idiot once it went down the way it did. If they would have told me I can’t do it, I would have for sure been like, ‘Well, it is what it is. … I wasn’t sure if this was even legal. And that’s why I asked the question.”
In many places it’s not legal.
The Federal Trade Commission points to shill bidding being illegal within the FTC’s Internet auctions guide, saying a seller “can’t place ‘shill’ bids on your item to boost the price.”
It’s difficult to say how pervasive shill bidding is across the collectibles market, but in recent months, several incidents have fueled growing concerns over just how widespread it could be.
Rick Probstein, founder of Probstein Auctions, one of the biggest sports collectibles consignment companies on eBay, left eBay after 20 years to start his own auction platform, “snype.” The website shuttered only a couple of weeks after it launched, citing a series of technical issues, amidst accusations of shill bidding from within.
Shortly after snype’s demise, eBay welcomed Probstein back to its platform.
“We’ve obviously had a relationship with Rick for many, many years,” eBay vice president and general manager of collectibles Adam Ireland told The Athletic. “He wanted to go off and do his thing. But part of what I’m always proud about with eBay is that we do have those relationships. So we’d always explicitly said to him that if this thing didn’t work out, there’s always a home for him back on eBay.”
Patrick Ryan, a noted Houston-based sports memorabilia collector, publicly admitted in November 2025 via social media to bidding up his own item in a Fanatics Collect auction. He consigned the card to another party (Acquir), then placed a bid on the card through the Fanatics Collect platform. But Ryan denied bidding for the purpose of propping up the price of the card.
“I am sorry for bidding carelessly in many auctions,” Ryan said via social media. “As a collector, one should be very deliberate in their approach to buying. It’s wrong to not be more careful.”
Claims of shill bidding serve as a major point within numerous arbitration cases filed by Whatnot customers against the live-selling platform, which also include larger accusations of conducting an unlawful gambling scheme and violating the RICO Act by allowing sellers to hold randomized box breaks and randomized repack breaks on its platform. As of Monday, 15 arbitration demands have been filed against Whatnot.
The Alt shill bidding occurrence comes amidst the company’s ongoing legal battle, in which it’s accusing another marketplace of the same practice.
In April 2025, Alt filed a lawsuit against auction house PWCC, which was acquired by Fanatics (and renamed Fanatics Collect after the timeframe of Alt’s allegations), alleging fraud and breach of auctioneer’s duty.
The complaint alleges PWCC conducted a widespread, years-long scheme of shill bidding, using internal and external actors to artificially inflate auction prices for high-value sports cards. Alt alleges PWCC retained access to confidential maximum bid information to drive up prices and mislead buyers.
Alt is asking for at least $13.7 million, which is the total losses the company estimates it sustained attributable to PWCC’s alleged fraudulent conduct. Alt is also seeking additional compensation for punitive damages.
Between 2021 and 2023, Alt said it spent more than $10.7 million on PWCC’s platform while winning 707 auctions and obtaining 809 items. In late 2023, Alt alleged in its lawsuit that it learned that PWCC’s leadership knew about shill bidding and directly encouraged and allowed other external parties to place fake bids on certain auctions, boxing out the authentic bidders and artificially inflating prices.
Alt also alleges in the suit that PWCC flagged when high net worth bidders, such as Alt, were participating in PWCC auctions, and arranged, solicited and encouraged shill bids to increase the bidding.
A PWCC/Fanatics spokesperson said that both sides had conducted discussions for months before Alt filed the lawsuit, including an ask for evidence of Alt’s claims. The spokesperson said Alt provided none and this is an attempt at a “payday.”
“Alt has filed a completely baseless lawsuit against PWCC that lacks any substantive evidence,” the spokesperson said. “Even though the accusations they are claiming occurred before PWCC changed ownership in May 2023, we carefully looked into their allegations and found zero evidence to support their claims.”
“Shill bidding has always occurred,” said Ken Goldin, founder and CEO of Goldin Auctions, one of the largest sports card and memorabilia auction houses in the industry. “If you own an auction house and you do proper management and proper software, I would say you either eliminate it or eliminate 99.5 percent of it.”
Goldin said “it’s a pain in the ass” to register for an account at his auction house, with multiple layers of identity and financial authentications required.
“Number one is we want to make sure that our consignor actually gets paid,” Goldin said. “Number two, we want to protect our bidders to the point where when you are placing a bid on Goldin.com, you know that you are placing a bid not against a bot, not against somebody who’s trying to bid on their own items, because that is not allowed in our software. And not against somebody’s brother or mother.
“Because guess what? We’ll look at bidding and we see somebody from the same address, somebody from the same IP address. We’ll get an alert and we’ll cut that guy’s bidding off and, in many cases, ban the consignor.”
Goldin isn’t naive, though, realizing that bad actors are capable of finding avenues to conduct shill bidding despite guardrails.
“I can’t tell you that in any auction in the world that one collector won’t say to another, ‘Hey, can you help me out and put a couple bids in this item? … Nobody can ever stop that,” Goldin said.
The Athletic contacted other prominent collectibles auction houses and marketplaces about how they combat shill bidding.
eBay, the largest of them all, said, “eBay has zero tolerance for shill bidding and uses a combination of technology and expert review to proactively monitor our marketplace, strengthen safeguards, and uphold a fair and transparent experience for our global community of buyers and sellers.”
They did not expand on what those uses of technology and expert review entail.
Fanatics Collect said it “has rigorous, industry-leading standards and we operate under strict published guidelines: no house bidding, no seller bidding on their own items, no hidden reserves, and no seller guarantees. Together, these rules exist for one reason: to ensure a fair, transparent marketplace that protects collectors and preserves the integrity of every auction.”
They did not explain how those guidelines are enforced.
Heritage Auctions said neither it nor its employees “participate in any form of shill bidding and we work to prevent it from occurring in our auctions. Heritage Auctions software specifically prohibits clients from placing bids on their consigned material with their account.”
The Alt shill bidding incident with the Vinatieri card consignor first came to light via YouTube and social media posts from Nick Andrews, known online as “Boston Card Hunter.” Andrews has posted numerous videos about the topic over the past few months, after the consignor said he commented about his issues with Alt during a live stream that Andrews hosted. Andrews’ LinkedIn page previously noted that he worked with Fanatics as a consultant.
“It is also a fact that the account that publicized a single screenshot from this exchange was run by a former Fanatics employee, the same competitor we are currently suing for over $13 million in shill bidding damages,” Alt said in a statement.
Andrews responded with a statement to The Athletic: “I am not, nor have I ever been, an employee of Fanatics. Alt is attempting to deflect attention from allegations of fraudulent shill bidding.”
The consignor said he was aware of Andrews’ possible ties to Fanatics, but said he didn’t know about the legal battle between Alt and PWCC/Fanatics until told by The Athletic during an interview.
Regardless of what the consignor knew when he spoke to Andrews, his text messages with the Alt representative indicate that a current Alt employee did not discourage a customer from committing shill bidding.
“It’s hard, but not impossible to police on a massive scale of people doing this type of stuff,” the consignor said. “But if you’re going to use a part of your company to go after another company for doing something, but then your company does that same thing too, and they get caught, it kind of adds to why this industry can be so gross sometimes.”
