As you may have guessed, this ugly situation is not going away. The fake listings have never stopped, only have they, from all appearance,  been concealed, or attempted to be concealed or obscured.

I have now posted another video which is in support of the findings of others, and to document the event/situation down on the 'quantum' level, (if you will), where we see the items appear in realtime, as invalid, AKA FAKE.
I do have several 'takes' showing this, some in much greater detail than as seen in the above vid.

The items have numbers & are being counted in the category totals, as observed.
The items all seem to have a common denominator, in that they all show as auction listings with more than 10 days remaining. As we all know, core items are listed for a max of 10 days. Store items do not show in core browsing. And of course, the obvious. They are invalid.
How & why are they there? What explanation will ebay have for these observations?

 Not that anyone expects anything resembling the truth from chronic serial liar ebay, but we may all get another good laugh if they do respond.

Are there any real journalists out there willing to press this issue and get some real answers?
So far, I have yet to see anyone do so. Which in it's self is beyond the pale, given the pure gibberish & lies which ebay has chosen to spew regarding the 'accidental test glitches', censorship and so forth. Apparently members of the press have de-evolved into parrots and 'yes-people' willing to repeat and/or swallow anything, and I mean anything.

  We can see reports of the continuance at the comments area of the AuctionBytes Blog article which originally dealt with this "Mystery Listings" issue, and elsewhere. These reports are being made and documented by several people from the looks of things.
Here is one such report from the above mentioned article:

by: Joe
Sat Mar 1 2008 13:57:33

"Looks like they are removing the listings, however they are being replaced just as quickly with new ones... try this: Go to the categories page... pick a category, say consumer electronics, then pick a sub category. Sort by "Time ending soonest" and scroll to the bottom of the page. It will say "Page 1 of 400" or whatever. Go to the last page by typing the page number in the box in the lower right corner of the page. This is where they are hiding them. Because the have no end time, the always stay at the back of the real listings and never move forward. They are in just about every category I checked. And there are who knows how many of these SDC seller IDs, hundreds, even thousands, all with thousands of listings. There could be millions of these listings all included in the auction counts. If Wall Street uses these counts to rate ebay, then this might be interesting to the SEC or the FTC."

Here is a screencapture of that post

This is basically the tip I followed making the video. Bear in mind, the video is but a tiny cross section of all of this, and others are reporting finding literally thousands and thousands of the 'phantom pages'

These pages are all being counted in the category and listing totals, yet when you visit one, you see a page devoid of any items.

Doc, from ebaymotorssucks.com and suspendedfromebay.com blog has done his usual excellent job of documenting this situation. We see a great explanation of his findings in the comments area at the Bloggingstocks article "Whats going on over at ebay"

3-05-2008 @ 7:57PM

DOC said...
"I have added my comments about eBay's suspected numbers fluffing on my blog:
http://www.suspendedfromebay.com/?p=71

eBay spokesperson Usher Lieberman responded by email to Ina Steiner on Saturday, “This was a limited test that has run its course.” But later retracted his statement. Which was it? A test or pumping the numbers up??
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/3/1204379814.html
Also I present this finding in the Clothing Shoes and Accessories Category.
eBay claims there is roughly 2473927 items in 49,599 Pages. If you look at the 50 items per page, they end on page 10,702.
Multiplying 50 items x 10,702 pages gives a total of 535,100 items in that category. Where are the other 1,938,827 Items??
Here are screen shots showing my findings..http://www.suspendedfromebay.com/postings-archive/

clothing-example-1.jpg
clothing-example-2.jpg
clothing-example-3.jpg
clothing-example-4.jpg

Something is fishy.."

Now here are a few screencaptures directly related to the latest video. These show a much higher item count than was seen in the video. Please note the times, and the time remaining on the over 10 days left items etc. I am not going to type out every little detail, nor do any math. Why keep having to point out the obvious or re cover ground every time? Simply put, the numbers and the stories told by spin-Meister ebay all add up to pure denial and LIES in the face of the facts.

eBay_Consumer_Electronics_375670_items_on_eBay_480.png

eBaY_Consumer_Electronics_374020_items_on_eBay_480.png

eBay_Consumer_Electronics_375759_items_on_eBay_480.png

eBay_Consumer_Electronics_Phantom_Pages_on_eBay_480.png

eBay_Consumer_Electronics_376190_phantom_items_eBay_480.png

(The  one right above is fresh, since this blog was posted. Note the time at the bottom, & the amount of listings showing over 10 days remaining.)

Here we see on March 7th, at 17:36 PTD, we see 'seller' sdc_Prod_434012  (o) with 55 items still on the site. They all come back as 'invalid' but note the dates listed here with the 'newly listed' sort prefs selected. What was that date they claimed the test or glitch  began?
eBay_Seller_sdc_prod_434012_items_listed_on_Feb26th_on_eBay_480.png

Here we see items which show as listed on February 20th, 2008:

eBay_Seller_sdc_prod_310426_160_items_eBay_Feb20_480.png

Ebay is a liar, aren't they?

 Please note there are classified ads seen in the screencaps, also actual ebay ewatch test listings  etc which are not part of the problem/issue, please disregard them.

Again, this is a tiny sliver of a cross section of what all is really happening. There are many many categories, whose counts are changing by the second. Due to the nature of the problem and the site, to fully document everything would truly be a Herculean task. This could almost  be 'the perfect crime', and I have a feeling someone else may think hope so.

Also, from yesterday and from March1st, I observed and documented one of the sdc_prod_* sellers item counts actually increase from 56 to 148

One more thing I want to brush upon here, I notice there was a lot of activity seen on the NASDAQ RealTime SEC Filings page for ebay within the last couple days.  What does it all mean?

March 8:
Adding this zip file for download. Deleted_Threads
This is 2.6MB  & contains the following:

Ebay boosting total with phoney listings L@@K.htm Page 1 & 2 (partial thread)

Im reporting ebay's padded listings to FTC for investigation.htm Page 1 & 2 (partial thread)

Is Ebay Creating Listings To Boost totals Look.htm Pages 1-12 (partial thread)

I see at Doc's suspendedfromebay.com blog archive pages and also at companyexposed they also have threads archived.

If you have a server, please put these on yours too and share them so the world can see what ebay wanted to hide. (by 'accident' of course)

Some of the above deleted threads were already saved as images and posted to CAPP if you just want to read them. Look for the thread title name.
Also already there are the Explanations from LiveHelp and Sign here as a witness of suspicious Auctions saved as text and images
There is still more to go. Working on finding out the earliest examples and how many earliest, etc. Lots to digest here.


http://budmalcolm.bravejournal.com/entry/25650

> I have yet to see anyone do so.

No large news organization will publish the events of the Leap Day weekend. But we'll help them with a short summary of the incident.

The eBay SDC_PROD Affair
http://eventhorizon1984.typepad.com/event_horizon_1984_blog/2008/03/internet-transa.html

Should be enough in the short article to get people curious enough to wonder, 'what happened?'