Have you guys heard about ESnipe?
http://www.esnipe.com/
For a small fee, you can use the service to make your bid with a few seconds left in the auction. I know that I've been outbid by people using this service before. I was looking for USRobotics I-Modems a few years ago and they always outbid me with less than 10 seconds to go. Of course, if other people are using the same service, the highest bidder will get it. But the idea of sniping is to not give other people a chance to outbid you early in the auction, and to not show interest in the item to anyone early in the auction.
By the look of things, the winner here must have used some auction sniping service as his winning bid was placed 9 seconds before the auction closed.
[ 29 December 2001: Message edited by: Sam W ]