A SWINDON eBay seller was offered seven times the asking price for a £25 ceramic remembrance poppy – despite measures banning their resale of the memorial items.

A seller named 10eggsrok received 16 bids for the poppy ornament on the auction site after listing the piece – one of 888,246 crafted for the Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red exhibition held at the Tower of London last year.

The iconic exhibition marked the centenary of the start of Britain’s involvement in World War One, with each poppy representing a soldier that died in the conflict.

In November, after a user attempted to sell poppies for double the asking price, eBay pledged to ban ceramic poppy resales and implemented a procedure to automatically remove listings that contained the items. Yesterday, bids topped £175 for the poppy in Swindon before the sale was suddenly ended.

It is unknown whether the website or owner removed the item from sale.

Heidi Griffin, herself the owner of two precious poppies, contacted eBay and the Adver when she realised the poppy was for sale online.

She said: “I’m just hoping someone can help before the listing ends and some unsavoury person has made money from this beautiful act of remembrance.

“I myself have two of these stunning works of art and I’m disgusted that anyone would consider selling it and making a profit from it.”

An eBay spokesman said in November: ‘We are not permitting resale of the limited edition Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red ceramic poppies on eBay.

“Any listings attempting to sell these items will be cancelled before any sale takes place.

“Our marketplace is not an appropriate venue for the limited edition ceramic poppies in view of the significance of each individual poppy as a memorial to an individual British military fatality.”

For four months, poppies created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins and set designer Tom Piper flooded the Tower’s famous moat, with more than five million people estimated to have visited the display.

The flowers proved so popular that all sold in advance for £25 each, raising millions of pounds for six armed forces charities. But the lure of a substantial profit encouraged some poppy owners to try to sell theirs online.

post their flowers online – and attempt to sell for at an inflated price.

A Royal British Legion spokesman said: “We are aware of previous reports of people attempting to sell the ceramic poppies from the installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red on popular online auction sites.

“We are working with these sites on the removal of these auctions and will continue to monitor this going forward.”

The remembrance poppy has been used since 1921 to commemorate lives lost in warfare.