They certainly can. Much easier to do so if they’re in league with the seller as they can easily cancel their bid prior to the auction ending.

After the auction has ended it can also go to next highest bidder as I mentioned with the ‘second chance’ offer.

1 of two things happening here:
1) Shill bidding.
2) Neither party has fully read the description, and both believe they are getting the whole collection.

I know where I would place my bet.
T

If the under bidder retracts his last bid then it removes all of the bids that the bidder has made.

Makes you wonder
 

Could it be the same person bidding , to put others off and retract their highest bid at the last minute????

Just a thought

Tony C

Even if you like military badges ( and presumably we all do or we would not be here on this site ) someone being prepared to pay this sort of figure ( for an item that perhaps should be in a museum ) does at the very least make you think that in this country some people can appear to be prepared to pay mindblowing figures on a badge whilst at the same time there are families relying on food banks and other families wondering how they are going to pay for their future energy bills.

Certainly food for thought !

P.

Unfortunately that is a hard reality of life and how it has always been without intending to sound crass or insensitive.

I expect many low income families could not spare the funds for the items you or I currently have for sale in the classifieds.

Long gone are the days when this was an inexpensive, swapsie hobby enjoyed by school children. For decades the hobby has increasingly grown out of reach for many.

Back to topic…

I’m surprised more SF collectors have not yet commented on this patch or ventured opinions on the current price.

I should like to hear the opinions of Mike B, Belly, 3battalion, HamandJam et al.

Price increases
 

When the pandemic started nearly two years ago with HM government handing out sums of money to people who were in need someone said to me "Who is paying for this?"

My reply was "we will as everything will go up in price", but I never expected to see a cloth badge rise in price as this one has.

What price will it reach?

Will the bidder pay up?

We await and see . . !

Rob

Someone I used to see every week sold one of several of the same badge out of a 50p/£ box that he didn't t rate as real, the buyer who was more than happy to end up paying nearly £1000 turned out to be an investment group.

Hello Luke
To a specialist Commando collector like me - the early 3 Commando with Troop numerals are extremely desirable. Relatively few survive. I was not going to comment, but clearly the market is difficult to fathom at times. It will be interesting to see how this all concludes ...
Regards
Mike

Thanks very much Mike.

So it’s a particularly rare one and early by sounds of it. That in mind and potentially being a final gap in someone’s cloth Commando collection it could easily be a ‘must have’ for some ardent collectors.

One wonders quite where it will end up!

In deed early and rare ... one of the few gaps in my WW2 Commando insignia collection ... but there are 'must have' prices and 'must have' prices as fellow members have commented. I hope the end result is mutually 'happy and agreeable', for vendor and buyer ... and that the deal concludes with integrity.

I knew one collector of early raf badges, who on learning that the end is coming, brought every badge he needed to complete his collection, regardless of the price, and enjoyed having them for just over a year.

The other interpretation as mentioned above is pure Shill bidding. I'm hopeless at spotting that sort of thing but is there anything to indicate from this and or previous sales that this may be the case?

Shill bidding relies on one of the bidders being legitimate.

I’ve been shill bid twice on eBay each time it went up in 50p increments until the one which beat my bid was retracted. Obviously that was little league compared to this.

So here either a legitimate bidder has bid £7,863 or £7,763.

Notwithstanding given what has been said by Mike B it would not surprise me if both are legitimate bids.