Author : Nicolas TERRY
Paper : Sandwich paper (Green tissue-foil glued on green foil paper)
Size : 15×15 cm
Our first auction item is this cheerful Cartoon Frog by Nicolas Terry. We’ll open the auction at 8 PM EDT (US) on October 25, 2011.
(Note that we’ll be using eBay as our auction tool; if you’re interested in participating but don’t have an eBay account, you can kill time from now until then by setting up an account!)
Origami Caravan 
On this first auction (Terry’s frog) on 10/26, 10:10:40PDT there are already 21 bids made by presumably individual who chose to bid as a “private bidder” (not the usual nickname, but plain “private”). Private bidders have bad press on eBay because they are linked to those guys who artificially try to pump prices up.
It is not a single individual bidding on the Cartoon Frog, it’s quite a number of people; we have made the auction private so that no one but the administrators see who’s bidding.
We didn’t realize this was frequently a problem on eBay, we’ll make a note to that effect on the auction description. Thanks for the information!
Thanks, Ann. I haven´t been bidding or selling on eBay for a long time (I used it a lot in the “old times”) so my comments may be a little outdated. I went to eBay and found two interesting things that I was not aware of. One is that since 2008, eBay “began masking the identities of all bidders from everyone except the seller. This had the effect of making all auctions “private”.” If you look at any auction that has biddings, you ‘ll see the bidders being indicated as “y***f” (The stars hide the nickname.) Unless you know who’s nickname is whom and you can guess from first and last letteres, there is no way to know who is bidding. Maybe since they introduced this change, there are less private auctions… that I don’t know. But as I said, in my “old times”, private auctions had a “bad smell”.