Okay gents, let us put on our tinfoil top hats and let me retell a conspiracy theory of mine that I almost half believe in.
Now, I bet we all had ourselves a merry old laugh when the eBay cartel started putting up mint or NIB game items for prices a few hundred notches above absurd. But I bet we all got the old earl grey in the wrong pipe when, just for fun, we flicked that completed listing box and saw that among a sea of red unsold items there was the unmistakable occasional green proof of hell having frozen over.
No one expects a mint or new Duo to actually ever sell for over 1-3000, but the green proves that someone, some idiot out there did buy it, so maybe the price is not so absurd, maybe, just maybe that is what it is actually worth, correct?
No! No, no, no, no, and an additional thousand nos I say!
I refuse to believe it. Rather I choose to believe that those green anomalies are all part of the cartel's nefarious scheme. You see, these guys buy up every legitimate new or mint auction they can land their hands on in eBay land by making sure to bid for them way over market price. This way they are already half way towards creating an absurd monopoly. What then remains next is to raise the market price to ten times normal levels and reap their evil reward.
How do they do that? By every once in a while using a fake account to buy one of their own items, then quietly using the fake account to put in a cancellation request which they then accept themselves. That way they wont really lose any money and what they gain is slowly setting the precedence that mint or NIB stuff really are worth that much. If they do this long enough people will accept it as norm and before long they'll land some crazy collectors who pay up and the whole operation is a success.
