I am purchasing a car from an auction house.

Question

I am purchasing a car from an auction house. This auction house is an agent in between and selling the cars on behalf of an insurance company who had put the cars for sale of their customers who could not pay the amount of the cars. Now what happens is that I am bidding on a car from their website and they give the buyer a few seconds to bid. If after my bid, the other customers do not bid in that given time, say 15 seconds, then the car is sold to me at the same time and I have to pay the amount which I had bid. Now there is one worker inside the auction company who is with us and freezes the system for us so that no other customer can bid after our bid, and we get the car at our price. So is this permissible to buy the car after freezing the system. The auction company sometimes asks their own workers to bid so that the price can go up. So it's like they also playing and we are using their same workers to get the cars at our price. Please note that the auction company starts the bid with the fixed amount of initial bid. So it's like the auction company is not in loss. Are these acts permissible?