[abbott]

In auctions like these the highest bidder will never follow through with payment. Unless this is some exceptional case. They are also fueled by shill bids. The bidder's account will be flagged for non-payment, and due to the priced nature of the breach of contract the account would then be closed permanently.

[alister]

Can you please also explain the motivation for anyone to do all the phony bidding. They don't intend to buy it, they risk getting their account closed, there's no side-channel profit (like ads) from the shill bidding, no one's going to be impressed by the fakery, so why?

[bradleyland]

Think of it as trolling. What is any troll's motivation?

Also, it is not safe to assume that the bids you see were placed by the actual account holders. There is a very active business in stealing and using other people's eBay accounts for use in fraud schemes. If you're someone sitting on a list of 1500 stolen eBay accounts, you might be happy to burn an account with a low feedback. Notice that most of the bids were placed by users with less than 100 feedback; these accounts aren't terribly valuable. The top bidder with 722 feedback is a bit of an anomaly, but that could be part of the troll: "I'm so l33t I burn accounts with 722 feedback!" Still, in the scope of things, 722 isn't that high for eBay feedback.

Then again, many of them could just be random people who don't care about their low-feedback eBay account. I know some people who have multiple eBay accounts for various reasons. It's not unusual for someone to forget that they have an eBay account, so they create another, then remember/discover the other one later. So what if you burn a spare account?

The bottom line is that when you're talking about an event with this level of attention -- hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of eyes -- the tiny statistical sliver of irrational behavior will begin to show up.

[Tarang]

It could for the attention it causes. Everyone's going to be talking about the listing.

It sort of creates a bit of value in the name 'Flappy Bird'

[TrainedMonkey]

Or not, because this is probably a violation of some Apple policy that you agreed with when installing anything from App Store.