I am pleased to tell you that eBay has reinstated the YearlyKos account, and we will restart the June YearlyKos eBay Auction Fundraiser on Friday evening, June 29th. Unlike previous auctions this will be a three day only auction! The auction will end on Monday evening, July 2nd. Because of the extremely short time before the auction begins, we will not be accepting any new items.
In reviewing both the diary I had previously posted to advise you that the auction had been canceled I realize I was not as clear as I could have been. eBay stated last Sunday that they canceled the auction due to suspicion of ‘Shill Bidding’. I told all of you that I had indeed bid upon three items which were subsequently bid up out of my price range, but I had placed those bids with my personal account, not the YearlyKos account. Although I informed you that there was no link between my personal account and the YearlyKos account, the responses of some led me to see that I had not been transparent enough.
My personal account with eBay, and the YearlyKos account with eBay do not have the same user name, owner name, email account, email server, snail mail address, nor even are they located within the same time zone. The two accounts do not have the same contact numbers, or account numbers. The YearlyKos account has PayPal, I do not, nor do I own a PayPal account. The only thing the two accounts had in common is the IP address of the computer being used.
As no information was the same between YearlyKos and my eBay account, I felt comfortable bidding on items within the auction with my personal account, as all money goes to YearlyKos, and none comes to me. However, we at YearlyKos do wish to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and none of the Auction Committee will bid on any items up for auction for either this auction, or any upcoming auctions in 2008.
eBay contacted us Tuesday morning to let us know they had mistakenly accused us of Shill Bidding, and they have restored our account. They have refunded our listing fees, apologized for the error, and wished us luck with our fundraising efforts. As far as they can tell, it is an error that should not have occurred.
We will continue to work on a dialogue that has been opened with eBay, and see what we can do to make future auctions run smoothly, and in a manner that is more fitted to the community.
Thank you so much for supporting YearlyKos 2007!