Not to discount your concerns, but (there’s always a “but”) it’s likely (I didn’t say “certain”) that if another snipe was placed within a 3-second window that snipe was sent by a sniping service/program, which even if your snipe hit 1 second before the end, the results would have been the same. It’s somewhat difficult (I didn’t say “impossible”) for another sniper to react to a bid within 3 seconds. There may be some in ebay land that are that fast on the draw, but I’d think they would be rare.
As far as being outbid by $1 – it could be that you lost by a lot more. With ebay’s bid increment system it’s usually not apparent how high the winning bid actually was.
If you feel you need a response from AS support, you might want to try this link: http://support.auctionsniper.com/