Neutral Auction House Ninjas? WHA?!?

One of the main reasons Eto and I moved our Horde toons to Shadow Council was to have some kind of access to the wealth our Alliance toons were hording. (No pun intended) The idea was to be able to switch stuff, with little cost, between factions on the neutral action house.

Last night we decided to move all the frozen orbs, gems and a few crafted BS items we needed from Eto's toons over. The idea, I would stand at the AH and snatch everything he listed at a somewhat low cost.

We post the first stack on the AH, a stack of goldclover, and as soon as we hit "post" we get the message "A buyer has been found for your auction...". Needless to say, I was a little shocked. Literally, this was as soon as he hit post auction. I hadn't even had time to hit my search key to pull up the auction.

So, we assume it was some lucky person that happen to grab the item. We change the price to be 2g per stack and drop one more stack. I successfully bought this one and 8 others before it happens again.

I /who the name of the auction winner and it's a level 1 orc located in BB. Interesting. A /target finds the orc in question hiding behind the boxes at the back of the auctioneer. I whisper him with a simple "Nice AH trolling". About the same time there is a yell coming through that says:

"If you are attempting to transfer items between factions using the AH be warned there is a thief waiting to nab your stuff. Be sure to check behind all boxes around all three auctioneers before posting anything. (yes there are 3)"

After whispering the nice alerter I find out this guy has been creating 3 different level 1 toons daily for the past couple of weeks, parking them near the AH and buying out all lowly priced auctions. Luckily, I hadn't posted the orbs or crafted gear yet. Over the course of the next hour and a half, I found all three of his toons and continued to alert anyone else trying to use the AH for item faction transferring.

Seriously...how much money could this guy really be making. I added all three toons to my friends list and for the remainder of the night (about 4 hours) he was on one or the other parked in BB.

Eto woke up early this morning to see if he was still around. The toons had been deleted and there were no level 1 toons around the AH. He was finally successfully able to transfer all the items via the AH but I'm pretty sure this will be the last time we attempt this.

As much as I hate the guy, I have to say he came up with a pretty good idea. At the cost of being a total ass. How could he possibly buy out items, at random prices, that quickly without using some kind of hack? Yes, there are only 3 pages of items on the AH (201 to be exact) but even continuously hitting the search button to test his abilities, I couldn't find newly posted items fast enough to beat him to them. He can't possibly know the name of random items people are listing so how is he able to buy out without a bot?

Sheesh.