I'm sorry Nick but what you describe is proxy bidding, where you get a friend or aquaintance to bid an item up even though they have no intention of buying it just to artificially raise the sale price.
That sort of bidding is banned by eBay and if discovered then the seller would have his/her account withdrawn. It is also one of the reasons why I never bid until the last few seconds of the listing.
My view is that it is no use being the high bidder with hours or even days to go, I want to be the high bidder when the auction ends and so I do not bid beforehand because all that does is to drive up the final price.