Suprisingly there are more and more of these shill/fake auctions appearing on ebay everyday.

Shill (or non-existent) Auctions are when a scammer lists an item for sale that he or she does not have.

The basic scam goes something like this:

A scammer creates an auction page, as you would with any item.

The auction page often shows pictures of the item, has a good description provided, and the auction is virtually identical to every other auction on ebay for similar items.

The only difference between this and other auctions is that the seller has no such item is his or her possession to sell.

The scammer gets bids on this item just like they would with any other auction, and after the auction is over, the winning bidder is contacted by the scammer who requests that the buyer sends payment.

Since the scammer never had any item to begin with, the buyer never receives his/her product, the scammer takes the buyer's money and the buyer never hears from the scammer again.

Some more common examples of this are The international business scam and The Romanian Computer Scam.