What is a "shill"?

Published by Jimmy Oldsun, Investigative Reporter

What is a "shill"?  This question arose as the consequence of the use of the term in a recent article written by my boss, Clark Kant.

Since there has been a bit of controversy arising from his use of the term, Clark asked me to define and explain the term in further detail.  The following is taken directly from Wikipedia:

Shill


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A shill is person who is paid (or in someway rewarded) to help another person or organization to sell goods or services. The shill pretends to have no association with the seller/group and gives onlookers the impression that he or she is an enthusiastic customer. The person or group that hires the shill is using crowd psychology, to encourage other onlookers or audience members (who are unaware of the set-up) to purchase said goods or services. Shills are often employed by confidence artists. The term plant is also used. The term is also used to describe a person who is paid to help a political party or other advocacy organization to gain adherents; as with the situation of selling goods or services, the shill gives the impression of being unrelated to the group in question, and gives the impression that he or she finds merit in the ideological claims of the political party.
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 desired (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, possibly because their income is tied to its prosperity. The origin of the term shill is uncertain; it may be an abbreviation of the Yiddish shillaber. The word originally denoted a carnival worker who pretended to be a member of the audience in an attempt to elicit interest in an attraction. Some sources trace the usage only back to 1914.

On the Internet

In online discussion media, satisfied consumers or "innocent" parties may express 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 praise the product anonymously in a discussion forum or group in order to generate interest in that product, service or group. In addition, some shills use sock puppetry where they sign on as one user soliciting recommendations for a specific product or service. They then sign on as a different user pretending to be a satisfied customer of a specific company.
In some jurisdictions and 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. For example, the plastic surgery company, Lifestyle Lift, ordered their employees to post fake positive reviews on websites. As a result, they were sued, and ordered to pay $300,000 in damages by the New York Attorney General's office. Said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo: "This company’s attempt to generate business by duping consumers was cynical, manipulative, and illegal. My office has and will continue to be on the forefront in protecting consumers against emerging fraud and deception, including ‘astroturfing,’ on the Internet."

Sock puppets

Sometimes shills may be used to downplay legitimate complaints posted by users on the Internet. See Spin (public relations) and sock puppet (internet).

In gambling

Both 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 and Shell game peddlers are notorious employers of shills. These shills also often aid in cheating, disrupting 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 (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.)

In marketing

See also: Astroturfing

In marketing, shills are often employed to assume the air of satisfied customers and give testimonials to the merits of a given product. This type of shilling is illegal in some jurisdictions but 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".

In auctions

Shills, or "potted plants", are sometimes 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. Shilling has a substantially higher rate of occurrence 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.[citation needed]The online auction site eBay forbids shilling; its rules do not allow friends or employees of a person selling an item to bid on the item.

In journalism

The term is applied metaphorically to journalists or 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 require full disclosure of conflicts of interest, and of any interference by other parties with the reportage.

In research and experiments

A shill in a psychology experiment, or the like, is called a "confederate". In Stanley Milgram's experiment in which the subjects witnessed people getting electric shocks, a confederate would pretend to be one of the experimental subjects who would receive the fake shocks, so that the real experimental subject would think that a draw of names from a hat was random. The confederate would always play the role of the learner, and the subject would be the teacher, and the subject would think that this was a random draw from a hat containing papers that say "learner" and "teacher".
In performance art, such as DECONference (Decontamination Conference), the confederates were called "deconfederates", and when a large group of (de)conference attendees were asked to remove all clothing prior to entry to the deconference, the deconfederate, planted among the attendees, would comply immediately with the request, causing all of the others to follow the orders and disrobe as well. [1](Reference: Volume 36, Number 4, August 2003, E-ISSN: 1530-9282 Print ISSN: 0024-094X, "Decon 2 (Decon Squared): Deconstructing Decontamination", August 2003, pp. 285-290)

In interrogations

Police or military interrogators sometimes use undercover agents (called "plants") to assist with the interrogation of an individual or suspect. The plant can pose as a fellow inmate or internee, build a rapport and earn the confidence of the interviewee. The plant may subtly suggest that telling the interrogators 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 prisoners of war who have been promised better treatment and conditions in return for helping with the interrogation. One notorious UK case is that of Colin Stagg, a man who was falsely accused of the murder of Rachel Nickell, in which a policewoman posed as a potential love interest to try to tempt Stagg to implicate himself.

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The only thing that I would hasten to add is this:

"Shills" may be paid or rewarded in a variety of ways.  It is not necessary that a "shill" be paid immediately in the currency of the realm for his services.  The terms of payment or reward may take various forms such as:

1.  Payment by check or in cash,
2.  Payment in goods and/or services,
3.  Payment in terms of special reciprocal favors,
4.  Payments or rewards which are promised or implied in the future for services provided today, and
5.  Psychic income which comes from participation in and/or leadership of the endeavor.

As the term "shill" is used when referring to people on websites which offer goods and/or services for money, make sure that you understand that the phenonemon exists.  Be on the lookout for "shills" when you visit a website which has a financial interest in promoting goods, services or the website itself.

Jimmy Oldsun
Investigative Reporter
www.hermannhearsay.blogspot.com