eBay and Craigslist finds

im watching a few auctions and cant fingure out how people are able to bid last second, my internet takes about 10s to refresh a webpage (using home internet in london), and i can only manage to get bids in within the last 5s of auction ending... am i missing something or is it a simple case of just timing the bid right? also how much is it safe to bid at the last second?

There are a load of utter cunts who use eBay 'sniper' software.

Basically you put in the max amount you want to bid and the software automatically sends in a bid just above the current max (but within your limit) in the last couple of milliseconds.

eBay have started cottoning on to this and are disabling accounts where they suspect it's being done through a sniper.