I used to sell LVL 0 characters for $1,500 back in the day! Boy the market sure has changed...
You slap Walkar's cheek, hard.He continues, "I've decided that I'm not going to let you serve community service, so don't get your hopes up. To this aim, you may either pay the fine of 50000000 silvers plus any other outstanding debts you may owe, or serve a total of 120 minutes of incarceration. You may ANSWER me either FINE or INCARCERATION as your choice. But I digress. Choose quickly, now, lest I hold you in contempt of court for wasting my time."
I scrolled through the first page of the character sale section, and I don't see anything that goes in line with what you are saying here. So what are you saying?
I've definitely noticed in some of my purchases. In more than one transaction, after I quit bidding, the OP pm'ed me and said the other bidder had decided not to buy and asked if I was still interested. In those cases I got some really good deals. All in all, it should work out in the end but beware the people will try to jack up prices sometimes.
If the last bid was false, that is more like a shill bid rather than a fake sale. A fake sale is more of a "long-con" whereas a shill bid is single-sale deal unless the conner develops a habit of applying it in subsequent sales. It should be fairly easy to determine whether you are being shilled or not simply be determining who that last bidder was (and doing due diligence like reviewing their sales and posting history), the item's market value and recent sales trends, etc. As I've observed, shill bidding is relatively rare here due to the size of the community, how easy it is to sniff out, and the relatively minor returns it would gain the seller.
On topic, I've also not observed any wildly aberrant values related to character sales. I certainly would appreciate more specificity to back up the OPs claims.