...is sniping software. Often, buyers using sniping software have no idea who they will be bidding against in the last 5 seconds of the auction, when all the bids are in and OTHER sniping software submits bids too.

When you see an auction on eBay that has no bids yet that doesn't mean that somebody hasn't seen the auction and already armed their sniping program to bid up to $XXX during the last 3 seconds of the auction.