Can remove a eBay auction?

Is there any chance the item was a fake or the seller had fraudulently inflated its value?

had anyone else bid on it? if an item has no bidders, i know the seller can remove it from sale. many times people post their items on many selling sites. he/she probably was able to make the sale on some other site and thus removed it from eBay. or maybe he/she found someone IRL (in real life) who wanted the item so that way the seller would be saved the hassle of shipping etc.

PnL is right on. The following describes it end a listing

It looked like a legit sale, with plenty of interested buyers, no “buy it now” button.

The item was also on sale on the local Craigslist.

to clarify – when you say “interested buyers” do you mean people watching the item or people who had already bid on the item?

People had already bid.

I looked at ‘whatthefluther’s’ link, and saw that with eBay motors this is fine as long as the seller sends a completion of transaction request to an eBay user.

A seller can always end a listing but most won’t. I’m a seller and I’ll end a listing sometimes if there’s no bids and I’m not willing to get sniped. And there have been times infrequently when I actually broke or damaged an item I was selling. Just consider the seller’s feedback before bidding. He was probably offering the item for sale elsewhere. This should be expressed in listing. And in that case the item is usually a fixed price listing. If it’s an auction and there’s bidding underway he really shouldn’t be offering it for sale in any other venue. You definitely couldn’t do that at a live auction. But there’s really no recourse because seller could just say the item was broken, stepped on or damaged and what can you do. I suppose if it was done frequently and enough complaints were lodged the seller could be called on it and lose seling priveleges but that’s highly unlikely. It’s one of the few benefits of the site that still favor the seller.