EBay, the online auction website, recently removed auctions for St. Louis Rams playoff tickets when informed that bidding exceeded the legal maximum price for reselling tickets in Missouri. The action follows the site's new ticket auction policy, designed to help ticket sellers better understand their local laws and prevent illegal ticket sales.

The new ticket policy, which began on Jan. 11, states that if a concert or sporting event is held in a state or province with a maximum resale ticket price, the seller must end the auction if bidding reaches that amount. In their listings, sellers must also include a paragraph that Ebay prepared which instructs bidders not to go beyond the stated maximum.

Fifteen American states and Ontario have legal limits on the amount for which a ticket can be resold. (Some cities have additional laws.) The states and Ontario prohibit the selling of a ticket for either a few dollars over face value or for a percentage over the face value. EBay has a list of state and provincial policies.

The removal of the football tickets isn't the first time the auction site has paid attention to ticket resales. Last fall, the site held discussions with officials from the states of New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey and the city of New York to devise a user-education effort to prevent the scalping of New York Yankees/Boston Red Sox American League Championship tickets. The site also participated in a "cyber-sting" operation to help Queens, NY investigators catch a particularly incorrigible ticket scalper who was selling World Series tickets on the site.

EBay is watching the site for all kinds of illegal items, including human organs, marijuana and cocaine. But it is difficult for eBay to police the site because 375,000-400,000 new items are added each day, said eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. EBay has a customer support team which watches the site for technical problems and illegal items, he said, but he could not say whether the site would eventually devote personnel to watch ticket auctions exclusively.

"Not only do we have to keep an eye out for tickets," he said, "but there's a good list of items you cannot sell on eBay in other areas as well. And those items are as much deserving of attention as tickets."

Pursglove said eBay will remove any ticket auctions which it finds violate local laws. Early Friday afternoon (1/14), there were at least fifteen ticket auctions for concerts by the Judds, Live, Britney Spears, ZZ Top/Lynyrd Skynyrd and Backstreet Boys in which the current prices were higher than the maximums allowed in the states where the concerts will take place. None of the sellers had the new eBay text stating a maximum limit in them, except for a broker who said that the money above the face value was for unspecified "additional merchandise and services."

When told of these auctions, Pursglove said that he would pass the information on to the customer support team for further investigation.

He also revealed that eBay had seen instances of sellers using the ticket area to sell merchandise and hotel stays, while offering free tickets to NFL games as a bonus. The ostensible items on auction were "camouflage" for the tickets, he said, so eBay removed the auctions.

EBay doesn't have any immediate plans to program its system to stamp applicable ticket auctions with the message about price maximums automatically . Instead, it wants to let the new rules sink in.

"Whenever we institute a new policy and inform the community," Pursglove said, "and we also show that we're going to be proactive in cooperating with the community as well as with law enforcement and regulatory agencies in removing many of these items from the site, then eventually, the sellers get the message and they go away. And we hope that will happen here."