Exact same issue last night. "Account Verification Required" prevented one snipe for an item on which there were no bids. Would have won, seller would have sold, ebay would have made money. Instead everyone loses. A snipe an hour later went through just fine. A manual bid entry today required no verification. I called ebay today and was bounced around to 4 different customer support reps in a foreign call center. After an hour on the phone they confirmed there is nothing wrong with my account and ultimately blamed the seller for requiring entry of the account verification captcha code, which is ridiculous. My theory is this is ebay attempting to thwart AuctionSniper and other bidding robots from sniping. Sniping clearly suppresses competitive bidding and likely costs ebay significant money. Appears to be random, maybe tied to IP address and time remaining in the bidding process, maybe a history of prior snipes. If this is true, it will unfortunately render Auction Sniper an unreliable means for bidding. Too bad because it has worked well for me for quite some time now. Sorry to hear others had the same experience. I plan to contact the seller who lost out and let him know why his item didn't sell.