Bad news if you bid on eBay item #260823841484 (CASEY ANTHONY LATEX RUBBER MASK EXT. RARE) and bid less than $999,900, as that was the winning bid allegedly placed by an unidentified person this afternoon. The auction closed at just after 6 pm Pacific time.

This must be especially galling for the person who started the bidding three days ago at $26, and then engaged in a then-likely-dramatic but now-ridiculous-seeming bidding war in $2-$10 increments until finally giving up at $100. (I'm not entirely clear how this works and am making some assumptions based on relatively sparse information, but you ought to be used to that by now.) It appears that the victor in that war was then himself defeated by someone willing to go above $150, and so things continued for a while. The high bid was into four figures by yesterday, which seems like a lot for a former-alleged-murderer mask but not totally unthinkable, given the possible value to a collector.

This afternoon, things got stupid.

At about 1:30 pm, not too long before my earlier post, the bid jumped from $2,151 up to $22,000. At that level, a number of bids were made and then retracted, a clear sign that the auction was starting to be influenced by people who may not have been fully serious about owning the simulated visage of an alleged child-killer. And once the bid jumped from $50,000 to $700,000, it was obvious that things were dominated by people who had no intention of paying.

Good work on the final fake bid, though, moving from $999,800 to $999,900 to claim the prize. We salute you, sir. We also hope you can be found and forced to pay a million dollars for a rubber Casey Anthony mask, but we still salute you.