Surely this has to be another example of the fake bidding detailed in the Crazy Happenings over on Shop Goodwill... thread? There doesn't appear to be anything special about that $80 SG1 to make it worth ten times that amount.

That would be funny - providing someone was actually on the hook for paying up their shill bid.

Something not-so-similar happened between myself and another member here (a fellow collector who I often go typewriter hunting with in person). Unknownst to either of us, we were the only two involved in a bidding war for an online typewriter, which in the end I won and as a result overpaid for. It wasn't until we met a week later that the auction came up in discussion and we realized what had happened. We now have a hard-and-fast rule to let the other know when we're bidding on anything online! 

I used to go to gun auctions in Rock Island, IL in person.  They had employees "peppered" in the audience bidding on their company's own offerings. 

How did I know...?  I have a collector friend who I would meet at gun shows and he was an employee of the auction house and raised his paddle during auctions.  He would even bid against phone bidders.  Found out they are 3-5 bidders in the audience for each event.

Once I learned this, I no longer met him at gun shows around the country.

This 1-key = script theory is not infallible or even likely. I have had 15 Royal portables with a 1 key, dated from 1956 through 198x, and only two of them have a script font, a '65 and a '71 Aristocrat. (That is out of 46 Royal portables, so it's true that most do not have the 1 key. In this small sample, the 1 key first appears in 1956 and becomes common, even standard?, by the late '70s. But how many Royals were ordered with a 1 key that I have not seen?)

This pattern my not hold with other brands.