That last reply should have been addressed to Chatter not Dave. Sorry.
Anyway, I had another thought about how it went down.
I as I mentioned I had alot of items closing on the night it happened. Their total was quite high, and my volume and amounts of transactions has been quite the last several months after a long hiatus.
Perhaps all this triggered additional scrutiny for my account and that scrutiny caused eBay to look very narrowly at my activities. My snipes became suspicious because their originating IP didn't match any of my other activity-- BLAM my snipe auctions got canceled and obliterated.
Quite possibly this all happened because I met certain criteria and thresholds in eBay's security algorithms. No actual person intervened to do this. Which makes all the more sense, because canceling long finished auctions really makes no sense.
The eBay support person really didn't seem surprised that it may have been triggered by sniped auctions.
So perhaps the lesson is watch your snipes when you have a high volume of large transactions at play.
So yeah Chatter and all, there probably isn't a reason to be paranoid, and eBay isn't out to get snipers per se. It's just sniping can trigger automatic security measures under certain circumstances.
Cool. I'm kind of relieved.