Shill

A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services or a political group, who pretends no association to the seller/group and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage others unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services or support the political group's ideological claims. Shills are often employed by confidence artists and governments.

The word "shill" is probably related to "shilliber", or alternatively "shillaber", a word of obscure early-20th century origin with the same meaning. One possible explanation for the origin of the word is the English name "Shillibeer". George Shillibeer was an entrepreneur who developed the first commercial bus service in the UK. Shillibeer was believed to employ confederates who could help him solicit more customers for his bus line.

In the UK the term plant is used, being similar with the North American 'shill' in many instances, and referring to having someone planted in the audience or in a crowd.

Shilling is illegal in many circumstances and in many jurisdictions because of the frequently fraudulent and damaging character of their actions. However, if a shill does not place uninformed parties at a risk of loss, but merely generates “buzz,” the shill's actions may be legal. For example, a person planted in an audience to laugh and applaud when appropriate (see "claque") or to participate in on-stage activities as a "random member of the audience", is a type of legal shill.

'Shill' can also be used pejoratively to describe a critic who appears either all-too-eager to heap glowing praise upon mediocre offerings, or who acts as an apologist for glaring flaws. In this sense, they would be an implicit 'shill' for the industry at large, as their income is tied to its prosperity.

Shills in Rap Music

For many years rap music has included product placement for cars, alcoholic drinks, clothing and other products, which appears to have gone largely unnoticed by its audience. Rappers will discuss at length the cars they drive and the drinks they consume and glorify the excess, decadence and luxury of a lifestyle spent wasting money on vanity products, working as shills for companies who are looking to reach a key demographic of the young music audience without having to change their mainstream brand advertising: for example, cognac drinks whose primary audience is for the older market, but who wish to appeal to a younger audience without losing their older fans, Hennessy, Rémy Martin, Courvoisier; or car companies like Mercedes-Benz and Bentley. McDonalds attempted to launch a project asking rappers to advertise their foods in their songs. For further reading look for 'product placement rap' on Google or see this article from Businessweek.

Shills in gambling

Both the illegal and legal gambling industries often use shills to make winning at games appear more likely than it actually is. For example, illegal Three-card Monte peddlers are notorious employers of shills. These shills also often aid in cheating, disrupting the game if the mark is likely to win.

In a legal casino, however, a shill is sometimes a gambler who plays using the casino's money in order to keep games (especially poker) going when there are not enough players. (This is different from a proposition player who is paid a salary by the casino for the same purpose, but bets with their own money.)

Shills on the internet

In online discussion media, such as message boards, discussion forums, and newsgroups, shills may pose as independent experts, satisfied consumers, or “innocent” parties with specific opinions in order to further the interests of an organization in which they have an interest, such as a commercial vendor or special-interest group. Websites may also be set up for the same purpose. For example, an employee of a company that produces a specific product may (directly or discreetly) praise the product anonymously in a discussion forum or group (often called spamming or plugging) in order to heighten and generate interest in that product, or a member or sympathizer of a special-interest group may pose as a highly-qualified expert in a specific field in order to give apparently disinterested support to whatever cause the group promotes.

Another example (although difficult to prove because of the secret and complex nature of shill marketing) is the potential for a forum administrator to accept sponsorship of the forum or other type of remuneration from a company that sells products related to the theme of the message board, and is paid under the secret condition that he or she protects the anonymity of the sponsor's shill by deleting any outing of the shills identity and real purpose for using the message board, thus acting as an auxiliary shill. However, to conceal this agenda the administrator could implement message board membership rules which disallow the outing of any message board member, as a means to explain their thus seemingly innocent protective actions.

In some jurisdictions and circumstances, this type of activity may be illegal. In addition, reputable organizations may prohibit their employees and other interested parties (contractors, agents, etc.) from participating in public forums or discussion groups in which a conflict of interest might arise, or will at least insist that their employees and agents refrain from participating in any way that might create a conflict of interest.

In some cases, the members of an organization or the employees of a company may monitor and/or participate in public discussions and groups. Such people are not shills, since they don't attempt to mislead others. Some of them may monitor groups in order to better evaluate public and consumer attitudes about a certain product, issue, etc.; others may participate in order to provide information about products or other topics in a neutral way. Some companies allow their employees to participate anonymously in public discussion groups for the purpose of providing information or expressing opinions, as long as there is no intent to defraud and the employee's affiliation with the company is not mentioned (because mentioning the company might make a personal opinion seem like a corporate policy announcement, which would be both misleading and likely to incur liability for the company). Occasionally employees of a company may participate openly in discussions but will include disclaimers making it clear that they speak only for themselves. Finally, on rare occasions, employees of a company may participate openly in a discussion and speak officially on behalf of their employers - but when this occurs, the employees are often moderators of the discussion venue as well, and may be sponsored by the company - as opposed to third-party venues, or open public venues such as USENET).

Shills in marketing

In marketing, shills are often employed to assume the air of satisfied customers and give testimonials to the merits of a given product. This type of shilling is illegal in some jurisdictions and almost impossible to detect. It may be considered a form of unjust enrichment or unfair competition, as in California's Business & Professions Code § 17200, which prohibits "unfair or fraudulent business act[s] or practice[s] and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising".

Shills in retail

In retail, shills assume the air of enthusiastic customers. This is done particularly when goods of usually negotiable prices, such as automobiles, are to be sold; otherwise, it is not very profitable. This type of shilling is probably legal, but rarely used because of the damage it threatens to a retailer's reputation.^{[citation needed]}

A more disturbing case is where a vacant shop is taken over for a very short period (say, a few days, or a week) solely to sell shoddy goods. The seller asks the audience who will buy the offered good-quality item, quoting a low price. The shill immediately "buys" it and triumphantly displays the item to genuine customers as he departs. The seller declares there are many more similar items and that they are fully guaranteed and returnable. In fact, subsequent sales to genuine customers are of faulty or very poor quality goods for inflated prices. Customers that later attempt to return the goods for refund will sometimes be intimidated and deterred by the seller's bodyguards, or be told to return on a later date (by which time the shop is no longer in business). This is usually illegal.^{[citation needed]}

Shills in auctions

Shills, or "potted plants", are frequently employed in auctions. Driving prices up with phony bids, they seek to provoke a bidding war among other participants. Often they are told by the seller precisely how high to bid, as the seller actually pays the price (to himself, of course) if the item does not sell, losing only the auction fees.

From an economic viewpoint, the issue is not that it forces a bidder to go higher than would happen without competing bids; that could be achieved legitimately by a minimum bid requirement or a reserve.

One shilling tactic is to have two shills. The first is a young child (or some other sympathetic character) who offers a low bid for a moderately-priced item. Other auction participants will be reluctant to outbid him. The second shill is an ill-mannered and usually overweight man who does just that - he outbids the child, who starts crying. In theory, this should provoke other auction participants to outbid the man solely for the sake of beating him; by bidding well beyond the item's value, he can artificially increase prices.

Shilling has a substantially higher rate of occurrence in online auctions, where any user with multiple accounts (and IP addresses) can shill without aid of participants. Many online auction sites employ sophisticated (and usually secret) methods to detect collusion, and a number of people have been sent to jail for online auction fraud in the past decade. See more at: The Hazards of Online Auctions

Shill bidding may be a common practice on eBay. In his book FAKE: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, Kenneth Walton describes how he and his cohorts placed shill bids on hundreds of eBay auctions over the course of a year. While many sellers consider shill bidding a harmless act, some believe that it may violate federal or state laws. Walton and his associates were charged and convicted of fraud by the United States Attorney for their eBay shill bidding. Some eBay sellers frown on the practice and a few spend considerable time trying to "out" those among them that use shill bidders as well as working to increase public knowledge of how to protect themselves from said shilling. Their tactics can easily turn up many "false positives" - for instance, they believe that auctions having many bidders with very low (less than 20 or so) and/or no feedback could be suspect.

However, many people have no problem with the practice. A market in which shill bidding is present can still be considered a free market - nobody is forced to purchase an item at a given price if they do not wish. In the same way, shill bidding tactics will not work and will cause additional problems for the seller if buyers do not wish to pay for the item above the amount of the bid placed. Therefore, the seller could easily end up having to sell their product at a lower price anyway.

[Now it would be appropriate to contrast "market value in which shills play" with "fair market value." It may be suspected that uninformed buyers will be impulsive in their bidding and be driven to obtain, even at shill-inflated prices, some desirable item. On the other hand, if the bidding were without shills the market would more likely produce a fair value that bidders could depend on. For example, how much is a used "yulsagier" worth? An informed buyer can compare a price new and compare condition of used, and depreciation the new value. But the value is still subjective, even when so-called experts arrive at a value. When a large number of independent potential buyers have done their research, or have foreknowledge, and there are recent consummated deals on comparable "yulsagiers", the highest bid price (without shills) approaches the fair market value.

With regard to auctions, a bidder must not think "here is a place for bargains." Instead, a wise bidder will think, "here is a place offering for sale something I want." In other words, an auction is simply a big "store."

Shill bidding is simply a method for sellers to control how much they will get for the item they are selling. Why should a seller take less? Why should a buyer pay more than his estimate of that item's value?

When an item is for sale at auction with "no reserve" it means the seller is willing to let the market determine the price. This is unrealistic for things that are worth more than a few dollars. Letting the market decide price may be more unacceptable if the market can be manipulated by the seller by shill bidding. A seller can easily protect his price in the market in the electronic age with shill bidding since there is never contact with other bidders.

Accordingly, bidders must consider "No Reserve" offers of items reasonably worth more than a few dollars at auction as suspect. A wise bidder might assume one or more other bidders (including the winner bidder) will be shills, and bid accordingly.

A bidder seldom shuts down bidding with a leap bid several hundreds or thousands of dollars in excess of the previous high bid. And what would motivate such a bidder to force a higher bid than necessary with a leap bid when he could bid in smaller increments and save money? Leap bids might suggest shill bidding.

An unreastically low bid early in the bidding might suggest a mistake or an idiot, but items with no bids suggests something is wrong with the item for sale. Sellers who don't respond to questions that might help you determine value or reason for selling, should be avoided.

What is more stunning is the large amounts of money being bid on items in which the oxymoron "sight unseen" is especially appropo, on items offerred "as is." It's risky enough buying a used car after kicking the tires and taking a test drive.]

In the UK, in addition to the term plant, a person employed to artificially drive up the price in an auction is sometimes referred to as a ringer. In Australia the colloquialism 'bodgey bidder' is approximately equivalent.

A new service has been created called [1]"shillspy" that can help build evidence against possible shill bidders on eBay. This service takes a seller ID and looks at the past 25 transactions of the seller, and using algorithms can detect possible evidence of shill bidding. According to safeharbor on eBay, in order to submit possible shill bidding claims to them, the user has to gather as much evidence as they can to submit. This tool makes it easy for people to gather potential evidence by generating a PDF report and emailing it to the user. The user decides if enough evidence has been found to pursue a claim of shill bidding.

Shills in journalism

Many people consider the use of shills in journalism - usually by those with commercial or political interests - to be the most dangerous of all.^{[citation needed]} The term is applied metaphorically, by comparison with the above, to commentators who have vested interests in or associations with parties in a controversial issue. Usually this takes the form of a show or network pretending to be offering news when in fact they are simply repeating "talking points" offered by a political party. Fox News has been accused as acting as a shill for the GOP, while the New York Times, CBS News, and CNN, for example, have themselves been accused of shilling for Democrats and other interest groups.

Journalistic ethics, of course, require full disclosure of conflicts of interest, and of any interference by other parties with the reportage. But it is difficult to draw the line between normal influence and illicit interference. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the internalization of sponsors' values by members of commercial media make it impossible to notice such conflicts of interest.

In interrogations

Plants can be used by police or military interrogaters to aid interrogation. The plant can pose as a fellow inmate or internee and build a rapport and earns the confidence of the interviewee. The plant may subtly suggest that telling the interrogaters what they want to know is the sensible or right thing to do. Even if no outright confessions are obtained, minor details and discrepancies that come out in supposedly innocent conversation can be used to chip away at the interviewee. Some plants are in reality inmates or POWs that have been promised better treatment and conditions in return for helping with the interrogation.

One notorious UK case is that of Colin Stagg accused of the murder of Rachel Nickell, in which a policewoman posed as a potential love interest to try and tempt Stagg to implicate himself.

External links