What's up with this? (eBay related)

[Whopbamboom]

I've been scouting stuff up on eBay over the past couple months, and lately I keep seeing some percussion items that have been bid on by user names such as:

a***t
n***g
u***u

etc.
That's literally how the user names are being spelled, with 5 characters total, and the middle three are asterisks! Anybody else notice this? What am I looking at? Seems to weird to me to be a coincidence...

[Derbeno]

eBay changed their policy a while ago whereby the bidders full name is not listed.
Just partly so you can still see the number of bids the individual made when checking the bid history

[Whopbamboom]

Huh. I never knew that, and it's weird that I only just started noticing that. Must be something pretty new.
I'm sure it has little to do with fraud... I think they just want to eliminate side-deals.