Shill
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A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services who pretends no association to the seller and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage other potential customers unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services. Shills are often employed by confidence artists.
The word "shill" is probably related to "shilliber", or alternatively "shillaber", a word of obscure early-20th century origin with the same meaning. One possible explanation for the origin of the word is the English name "Shillibeer". George Shillibeer was an entrepreneur who developed the first commercial bus service in the UK. Shillibeer was believed to employ confederates who could help him solicit more customers for his bus line.
In the UK the term plant is used, being identical with the North American 'shill' in most instances, from having someone planted in the audience or in a crowd. This may be to avoid confusion between the British monetary unit of the shilling and the gerund form of the word "shill". However plant does not carry as strong a negative connotation as 'shill'
Shilling is illegal in many circumstances and in many jurisdictions because of the frequently fraudulent and damaging character of their actions. However, if a shill does not place uninformed parties at a risk of loss, but merely generates “buzz,” the shill's actions may be legal. For example, a person planted in an audience to laugh and applaud when appropriate, see "claque", or to participate in on-stage activities as a "random member of the audience", is a type of legal shill.
'Shill' can also be used pejoratively to describe a critic who appears either all-too-eager to heap glowing praise upon mediocre offerings, or who acts as an apologist for glaring flaws. In this sense, they would be an implicit 'shill' for the industry at large, as their income is tied to its prosperity.
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[edit] Shills in Rap Music
For many years rap music has included product placement for cars, alcoholic drinks, clothing and other products, which appears to have gone largely unnoticed by its audience. Rappers will discuss at length the cars they drive and the drinks they consume and glorify the excess, decadence and luxury of a lifestyle spent wasting money on vanity products, working as shills for companies who are looking to reach a key demographic of the young music audience without having to change their mainstream brand advertising, e.g. cognac drinks whose primary audience is for the older market, but who wish to appeal to a younger audience without losing their older fans, Hennessy, Rémy Martin, Courvoisier, or car companies like Mercedes-Benz and Bentley. McDonalds recently launched a project asking rappers to advertise their foods in their songs. For further reading look for 'product placement rap' on Google or see this article from Businessweek.
[edit] Shills in gambling
The illegal and legal gambling industries often use shills to make winning at games appear more likely than it actually is. For example, illegal Three-card Monte peddlers are notorious employers of shills. These shills also often aid in cheating; they will disrupt the game if the mark is likely to win.
In a legal casino, however, a shill is sometimes a gambler who plays using the casino's money in order to keep games (e.g. especially poker) going when there are not enough players. (This is different from a proposition player who is paid a salary by the casino for the same purpose, but bets with their own money.)
[edit] Shills on the internet
In online discussion media, such as message boards, discussion forums, and newsgroups, shills may pose as independent experts, satisfied consumers, or “innocent” parties with specific opinions in order to further the interests of an organization in which they have an interest, such as a commercial vendor or special-interest group. Websites may also be set up for the same purpose. For example, an employee of a company that produces a specific product may (directly or discreetly) praise the product anonymously in a discussion forum or group (often called spamming) in order to heighten and generate interest in that product, or a member or sympathizer of a special-interest group may pose as a highly-qualified expert in a specific field in order to give apparently disinterested support to whatever cause the group promotes.
Another example, although difficult to prove because of the secret and complex nature of shill-marketing, is the potential for a message board Forum administrator to accept sponsorship of the forum or other type of remuneration from a company that sells products related to the theme of the message board, and is paid under the secret condition that he/she protects the anonymity of the sponsor's shill by deleting any outing of the shill's identity and real purpose for using the message board, thus the Forum administrator acts as an auxiliary shill. However, to conceal this agenda the Forum administrator could implement message board membership rules which disallow the outing of any message board member, as a means to explain their thus seemingly innocent protective actions.
One relatively high-profile example of an internet shill is Steve Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com, who specialises in spreading distorted interpretations of science for the benefit of corporations such as the tobacco company Philip Morris.[1] Milloy is unusual in that he does not, at least in this case, operate anonymously or under an assumed identity. In many cases it can be very hard to distinguish the shills in an online forum from those who sincerely believe something that may be false.
In some jurisdictions and in some circumstances, this type of activity may be illegal. In addition, reputable organizations may prohibit their employees and other interested parties (contractors, agents, etc.) from participating in public forums or discussion groups in which a conflict of interest might arise, or will at least insist that their employees and agents refrain from participating in any way that might create a conflict of interest.
In some cases, the members of an organization or the employees of a company may monitor and/or participate in public discussions and groups. Such people are not shills, since they don't attempt to mislead others. Some of them may monitor groups in order to better evaluate public and consumer attitudes about a certain product, issue, etc.; others may participate in order to provide information about products or other topics in a neutral way. Some companies allow their employees to participate anonymously in public discussion groups for the purpose of providing information or expressing opinions, as long as there is no intent to defraud and the employee's affiliation with the company is not mentioned (because mentioning the company might make a personal opinion seem like a corporate policy announcement, which would be both misleading and likely to incur liability for the company). Occasionally employees of a company may participate openly in discussions but will include disclaimers making it clear that they speak only for themselves. Finally, on rare occasions, employees of a company may participate openly in a discussion and speak officially on behalf of their employers—but when this occurs, often the employees are moderators of the discussion venue as well, and it is likely to be sponsored by the company (as opposed to venues operated by third parties or open to anyone, such as USENET).
Given the growing importance of Wikipedia as a source of information it is no surprise that it too is targeted by shills. Naturally this creates a great deal of work for administrators and other contributors repairing the damage these people do.
[edit] Shills in marketing
In marketing, shills are often employed to assume the air of satisfied customers and give testimonials as to the merits of a given product. This type of shilling is illegal in some jurisdictions and almost impossible to detect. It may be considered a form of unjust enrichment or unfair competition, as in California's Business & Professions Code § 17200, which prohibits "unfair or fraudulent business act[s] or practice[s] and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising".
[edit] Shills in retail
In retail, shills assume the air of enthusiastic customers. This is done particularly when goods of usually negotiable prices—like automobiles—are to be sold; otherwise, it is not very profitable. This type of shilling is probably legal, but rarely used because of the damage it threatens to a retailer's reputation.
A more disturbing case is where a vacant shop is taken over for a very short period (say, a few days, or a week) solely to sell shoddy goods. The seller asks the audience who will buy the offered good-quality item, quoting a low price. The shill immediately "buys" it and triumphantly displays the item to genuine customers as he departs. The seller declares there are many more similar items and that they are fully guaranteed and returnable. In fact, subsequent sales to genuine customers are of faulty or very poor quality goods for inflated prices. Customers that later attempt to return the goods for refund will sometimes be intimidated and deterred by the seller's bodyguards, or be told to return on a later date (by which time the shop is no longer in business). This is usually illegal.
[edit] Shills in auctions
Shills, or "potted plants", are frequently employed in auctions. Driving prices up with phony bids, they seek to provoke a bidding war among other participants. Often they are told by the seller precisely how high to bid, as the seller actually pays the price (to himself, of course) if the item does not sell, losing only the auction fees.
This practice is illegal in virtually all jurisdictions.
From an economic viewpoint, the issue not that it forces a bidder to go higher than would happen without competing bids; that could be achieved legitimately by a minimum bid requirement or a reserve. It is that it creates a false market by suggesting to a bidder that there are others willing to pay a high price, increasing the bidder's confidence that the item has a market value close to the bid.
One shilling tactic is to have two shills. The first is a young child (or some other sympathetic character) who offers a low bid for a moderately-priced item. Other auction participants will be reluctant to outbid him. The second shill is an ill-mannered and usually overweight man who does just that—he outbids the kid, who starts crying. In theory, this should provoke other auction participants to outbid the man solely for the sake of beating him; by bidding well beyond the item's value, he can artificially increase prices.
Shilling is an even larger problem in online auctions, where any user with multiple accounts (and IP addresses) can shill without aid of participants. Many online auction sites employ sophisticated (and usually secret) methods to detect collusion, and a number of people have been sent to jail for online auction fraud in the past decade. See more at: The Hazards of Online Auctions
Shill bidding may be a common practice on eBay. In his book FAKE: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, Kenneth Walton describes how he and his cohorts placed shill bids on hundreds of eBay auctions over the course of a year. While some dishonest sellers consider shill bidding a harmless act, it may violate U.S. federal law. Walton and his cohorts were charged and convicted of fraud by the United States Attorney for their eBay shill bidding. Most eBay sellers seriously frown on the practice and many spend considerable time trying to "out" those among them that use shill bidders as well as working to increase public knowledge of how to protect themselves from said shilling. In general, auctions having many bidders with very low (less than 20 or so) and/or no feedback could be suspect.
An extensive investigation by The Sunday Times in January 2007 uncovered substantial evidence of shill bidding. [See http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/01/ebay_shilling.html]. eBay's decision to hide much information about bidders once an auction reaches a particular price have opened it to accusations of encouraging shill bidders by making them significantly harder to identify. The case has been put that it is in eBay's interests to protect high turnover sellers who profit from shill biding since they generate substantial income for eBay. There are claims that this change in policy, favouring unethical sellers over buyers, has significantly weakened eBay's reputation both amongst buyers and ethical sellers.
In the UK in addition to the term plant a person employed to artificially drive up the price in an auction is sometimes referred to as a ringer.
[edit] Shills in journalism
Many people consider the use of shills in journalism—usually by commercial or political interests—to be the most dangerous of all.[citation needed] The term is applied metaphorically, by comparison with the above, to commentators who have vested interests in or associations with parties in a controversial issue. Usually this takes the form of a show or network pretending to be offering news when in fact they are simply repeating "talking points" offered by a political party.
Journalistic ethics, of course, require full disclosure of conflicts of interest, and of any interference by other parties with the reportage. But it is difficult to draw the line between normal influence and illicit interference. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the internalization of sponsors' values by members of commercial media make it impossible to notice such conflicts of interest.
[edit] In interrogations
Plants can be used by police or military interrogaters to aid interrogation. The plant can pose as a fellow inmate or internee and build a rapport and earns the confidence of the interviewee. The plant may subtly suggest that telling the interrogaters what they want to know is the sensible or right thing to do. Even if no outright confessions are obtained, minor details and discrepancies that come out in supposedly innocent conversation can be used to chip away at the interviewee. Some plants are in reality inmates or POWs that have been promised better treatment and conditions in return for helping with the interrogation.
One notorious UK case is that of Colin Stagg accused of the murder of Rachel Nickell, in which a policewoman posed as a potential love interest to try and tempt Stagg to implicate himself.
[edit] External links
- what-is-shill-marketing
- "I'm evil" internet shill job role article
- "Strange bedfellows: Journalists as corporate shills"
- Mainstream Media Shills For NATO
- Confessions of a Government Shill | By Andy Borrowitz
- Corporate Shill Enterprise: A Corporate Lobbying Front Group
- American Media: Government Shills?
- Some American journalists accused of being spokespeople for the administration
- The Hazards of Online Auctions
- Internet Shills: Old Trick, New Tech
- EBay's policy
Categories: Articles which may be biased | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Commercial crimes | Ethically disputed business practices | Deception | Marketing | Personal selling | Promotion and marketing communications | Gambling terminology
