Well, as it has been commented, Mandarake has the 
habit of pulling out items on ebay, sometimes 
items with bids and somtimes without any bids.... 
The fact is that Mandarake mainly uses ebay for 
advertisement, they prefer to do direct sales. 
They price their items with the amount they 
expect to get, so we can consider that it's like 
a "Buy it Now" auction but without the explicit 
option. 

This is how it works (i believe).... someone bids 
on their auction and sometimes (specially on 
expensive items) they contact the highest bidder 
telling that they are considering to close the 
auction early as there are not many people 
bidding and then ask that person if you he/she is 
interested on a direct sale, if so they cancel 
the auction including the current bids and they 
do the sale on private.... By doing this they 
avoid having to pay the ebay fees for a succesful 
auction, and as they have priced the items with 
the price they want to get they don't really care 
about bid wars on the last minute....

Anyway, seems that ebay is aware of this 
practice, in fact some of these "pull offs" are 
not really done by Mandarake but instead done by 
ebay arguing that the seller has bypassed some of 
ebay's policies. What i don't really know is how 
frequently this happens because if it's very 
frequently ebay would have already cancelled 
their user ID....

So well, my recomanation.... if you see an item 
you want on an ebay auction by Mandarake bid on 
it right away. If the auction is pulled off and 
you still want the item just contact Mandarake 
asking about the item and you have a lot of 
chances that they will sell it to you directly or 
tell you that they are going to relist it (if 
they tell you that just bid again as soon as you 
see the item listed and this time you may have 
more chances of them contacting you to do a 
private sale).....

You may think.... how is it that you know this? 
Well, easy answer, it has happened to me.... on 
the first time i have placed a bid on one of 
their auctions, just a few days ago.... the first 
time i placed the bid ebay cancelled all their 
auctions (so it was not a full-off by Mandarake). 
Ebay contacted me informing me about the 
cancelled auction and then i e-mailed Mandarake 
asking for a private sale or about if they were 
planning to relist the item. They told me that 
they were going to relist it this week.... They 
did, and i placed my bid as soon as i saw the 
auction listed. In less than 24 hours Mandarake 
contacted me telling me that they were 
considering ending the auction early because they 
were thinking that i was the only person 
interested on that item.... and they told that 
they would close the auction as soon as i had 
sent the payment.... I sent the payment and they 
cancelled the auction including my bid (if 
someone takes a look tothe auction page it would 
appear as "The seller has closed the auction 
early and cancelled all bids because the item is 
no more for sale", but the item is not for any 
more for sale anymore because it's already on 
it's way to me from Japan).... 

I thought it was an exceptional situation as 
everything was preceded by a cancelation done by 
ebay, but now that i read that pull offs are 
frequent in Mandarake auctions i believe this 
what really happens. Definatelly a risky 
practice. I only continued with the deal because 
the seller was Mandarake, would have never done 
it if it was a "normal" seller.....