great post

Sounds like someone read about the dollar auction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction) and decided to turn it into a business plan.

I went ahead and tested out 30 bids on swoopo.com. I can confirm there is no possible away of winning anything cheap. The amount of people placing bids was insane.

My fear is that all it would take is for a bot, written by their company, to keep the bids going until they made their money back. I actually saw prices go over the retail amount.

My advice is to stay away.

Any "cease and desist" letters from swoopo's legal goons arrive yet?

I wish i'd invented this. Seriously.

Oh no, I am kidding.

How will this software get a 22 year old laid? If they figure that one out, Google better watch out. I suspect Dr. Evil might be one of the founder.

I came across this site while shopping for my wife's Christmas gift (a portable navigation system, like a Garmin or TomTom). The prices were amazing and you know the saying, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."

After reading more into the service I couldn't believe the scam they were running.

My thinking is - you may be able to come away with a few deals on this site if you had a lot of historic data. If you knew an iPod sold for $100 the past 100 auctions, you could then immediately bid that amount and hope it was too high for others to bid, thus getting that item for $100.75 (with the price of your bid).

It all just seems to iffy for me to even want to take part in. Thanks for pointing out this shady service Jeff, hopefully others that aren't as willing to read into what they are getting into will see this post first.

They can trade sex for swoopo bid tokens

This is completely brilliant.

I can't see why this would be considered any more illegal or unethical than a state-run lottery, though. It's essentially the same system, and presumably the same dumb people getting suckered in by it.

What if they gave 15% of their gross to charity? Would that affect your opinion of them?

Endowment Effect...

Sounds like the same thing is fueling the US financial system bailouts.

Regarding that endowment effect, it reminds me of a recent story about an otherwise sane older woman blowing $400,000 in retirement money by giving it to a Nigerian scammer because she just couldn't stop:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2008/11/this-woman-sent.html

Crazy...

A clever hack of human nature. Early on people pay the $0.75 "bidding fee" for the bid because the price is so low... the less than a dollar potential loss is far less than the savings. Later, the committed bidders who have run the price up suffer from sunk cost psychology and can't stop bidding.

That all said, I'm not quite sure where the illegality is. It isn't a lottery, as the winner is deterministic: the final bidder with the highest bid. Depending on how the terms of service has armored the $0.75 bidding fee against claims of fraud, this might just be one of those "legal, only because nobody thought of it before" cases.

> I can't see why this would be considered any more illegal or unethical than a state-run lottery, though.

Because it is ... not state-run?

----

When you get people to pay 0.75 x 30 to increase the price 0.15 x 30 for something they will not get - yes, that's evilishly smart. Maybe the perfect shopping experience: You get to pay money, getting excited by thinking that you bought it (for a while, until someone *stupidly* thinks it's worth more than you, then, where willing to pay) and you don't even have to fill your home with stuff you don't need!

The clause doesn't let them ship something equivalent; it says that in the event if a winning item is unavailable, they can offer you an equivalent item.

The distinction is that in this case, the winner must accept the offer; I interpreted your meaning as if they can arbitrarily ship you an equivalent item without your consent.

Why should this be illegal? Immoral, sure, but those dumb people are throwing away their money of their own free will...

Last second sniping is not a "huge problem" with auction sites - it is a legitimate tactic!

I hate double posting, but I just spent a few minutes watching the front page at Swoopo.

Never before has greed been more clearly displayed in all of its glory. The flash of red that indicates a new bid (and $0.75 more in the site's pocket) is mesmerizing.

Unlike the earlier poster, I wish I had thought of this. No provisos.

Heh. We have had these things in Finland for a few months and apparently they still pull in new users. When fiksuhuuto.com was new, I did some logging (it shows the name of latest bidder on main page so that's easy with some screen scraping) and found out that most users try just a few bids before they find out that if is not worth it. However, there were some users that put in hundreds of euros during the couple of days I collected data.

As far as I know, there is a lawsuit against them but it is progressing as slowly as lawsuits usually do.

One of my co-workers had a brilliant idea. Over under betting on how high the price will get along side the right to buy bidding.

This site is amazing. I simultaneously can't believe that people would spend money to buy a bid, and at the same time I'm somewhat in awe of the dastardly assholes who came up with this cash-printing scheme.

This is an evil plan but I'm not willing to call it gambling. This seems no different than a seat licensing system. You pay for the opportunity to purchase an item. It just happens that you bid on the seat license and the item. Effectively raising your cost .90 each time. The outcome does not require luck and is deterministic.

swoopo is a rip off. It is to difficult to win.

I'll just stick to low bid auction sites like http://www.UTurnBids.com for my "want to get cool stuff really, really cheap" cravings.

Also I like how the swoopo labels completed auctions as "Ended"

Here's a nice example of how purely evil (or bugged) swoopo.com actually is.

If two (or more) people have a BidButler on the same auction, they can get into a bidding war that can cost the users several dollars over the course of half a second.

I was watching a Wii auction and noticed the BidButlers bidding every now and then when the timer was almost up and the user wasn't winning. However, at one point, the timer (which had been sub 15 seconds) spiked to about 5 minutes and I noticed two BidButlers battling it out in the bidding history. Each BidButler bid would trigger the other one to bid since it was no longer winning and the timer hadn't updated yet. This was an easy $15 for swoopo.com.

That seems like something they could get into a lot of trouble for since the system is essentially stealing money, but I guess when you have no soul you don't worry about that kind of thing. =/

Another thing... one supposes that the powers-that-be at swoopo will participate in an auction if it isn't showing a profit-- Boosting an auction is a pure win for them, since bids don't cost swoopo anything, and any 'user' (i.e., 'sucker') participation at a higher auction level is pure profit... right?

This site was almost certainly invented by Dogbert.

For those interested, an employee from Swoopo responded to a critical post here:

http://thecakescraps.com/2008/09/25/pure-profit-a-look-at-swoop/#comment-18

"But, FYI� Swoopo loses money on about 70% of the auctions. So, we take a bit of a gamble in hopes that the remaining 30% of the auctions cover the costs of the products and our overhead."

Each auction is basically a miniature ponzi scheme. I don't think it's really relevant whether some or all of the people in a ponzi scheme know that they are playing chicken with the other participants. It should still be illegal. If this is gambling--and at best it is--it should be clearly labeled and regulated as such.

This kind of sites was found to be a lottery in Sweden and was banned, but the owners just moved to UK and runs it from there nowdays.

Most of them got hacked and people noticed that the owners had tons of fake accounts making bids so there was no winners on it except the owners that took in the cash.

So, these kinds of sites are really more or less just scams!

/Marcus

There doesn't seem to be any way to prove that the owners of the site themselves are not bidding on items, which would cost them nothing and drastically inflate the bid total.

Meanwhile, Dubli runs the same racket, but the bids go down instead of up. Is it less evil?

Meanwhile, Dubli runs the same racket, but the bids go down instead of up. Is it less evil?

That is so brilliantly predatory that I'm truly envious.

I mean, seriously, I'm watching the bids and mentally calculating how much money they're raking in per *minute*...

Yeah, it's predatory and probably morally "grey" - at best - but at the same time, it's brilliant.

A fool and his money are easily parted.

As much as I think it's a scam, that is pure genius. I'd heard about the dollar auction from economics, but never thought of putting it in to use like this.

Yes it's extremely unethical... but my god it's clever.

Funny part is, there are more fools then there are money.

I decided to check the site out and see how things worked. They must be rolling in money. I did some quick calculations on one of the Toshiba laptops they had listed as a penny bid, staring at a penny and they are reporting the last one auction closed at $109.27. One the surface someone got a heck of a deal, less than 10% of the retail price, I would hate to think how much the winner paid in bidding fees.

Swoopo made out like bandits, almost $8,200 in bidding fees and after buying and drop shipping that laptop they probably pocketed around $6,800. Actually lets be generous and say the 'administrative costs' for the auction was $800 - that is still $6,000 in pure profit on one item.

The sad thing is in troubled economic times people will find this site looking for a bargain and greatly enriching those running this company.

Awesome post. I saw you mention it on Twitter and had a gander at the site. I can't believe that people are this uneducated to not understand the simple Algebra behind this. Then again, American Idol gets great ratings...

> On the surface someone got a heck of a deal, less than 10% of the retail price, I would hate to think how much the winner paid in bidding fees.

One person gets a "great" deal (depending on how many 75 cent bids they placed), and hundreds or thousands of other people lose money.

The only way to beat this system would be for every bidder to collude *not to bid*. Worldwide. So, impossible, in short. You can't beat the house.

I'm not sure what law you think they must be violating, offhand.

It's pretty vile, but I see no reason to imagine it must be illegal.

(I also find it hard to believe the "employee"'s claim that they lose money on 70% of the auctions... unless they're only getting one or two bidders.

I suppose it possible they have a lot of low-value auctions of cheap stuff, so they can lose a small amount of money on them to pad the stats; things like the aforementioned laptop are <I>insanely</i> profitable.

I'd love for that "employee" to tell us what the average profit/loss per auction was.)

They put Vegas to shame. Pure brilliance. If you're going to build a gambling website, this is the way to do it!

I discovered Swoopo a few months ago and had pretty much the same reaction as Jeff and most of the commenters here.

I also spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia, starting on the "Dollar Auction" page, moving on to "Logical Fallacies", "Irrational Escalation of Commitment", and "Cognitive Biases" pages (and lots of subpages) looking for ideas for my own barely-legal psychological-trap site.

Learned a lot, but didn't have any ideas.

Here's how to make a nice profit off of the profiteers.

Set up your own website. Charge 40 cents per bid and drive up the price by 10 cents for every bid received. Every second bid, you pass through to swoopo. The other half of the bids you make a record of, but otherwise don't act on.

Your website would make 80 cents per swoopo bid, which cost you 75. It would also drive up the price by 20 cents per swoopo bid, of which you keep 5 cents. All of swoopo's customers would come to your site because on the face of things it offers a better deal.

Someday, I will have an idea as good as this.

The director of business development for swoopo, Chris Bauman, responded to an interview here:
http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/gadgetell-interview-swoopo-speaks/

Some unbelievable responses.... apparently the only reason we are angry is because we are losers:

JG: Why are some people are getting really pissed off at Swoopo? Chris Bauman: It is unfortunate that an auction has just one winner. It is the nature of the beast. People that don�t win are going to be mad, even regretful sometimes, but those very same feelings happen on other auctions like eBay too.

This is about as evil as the "win a free ipod" crap!!

It is evil, but the people who play it must be really dumb or desperate. Works maliciously well.

(The verb playing fits well. They should use it)

The whole swoopo thing actually reminded me of a joke that I heard on the www.boagworld.com podcast a couple of weeks ago. Seems like the joke is maybe on those who are bidding! The joke went like this:

A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country, bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100.00.

The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died."

Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."

The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

Kenny said, "OK then, just unload the donkey."

The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"

Kenny, "I'm going to raffle him off."

Farmer, " You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"

Kenny, "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead."

A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?"

Kenny, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $898.00."

Farmer, "Didn't anyone complain?"

Kenny, " Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back."

And others could do the same to your service (with decreasing profit margins) and just have a big happy chain of it. "My god, it's full of scams!"

Why would you waste keystrokes on this? Who cares?

I just saw a wii fit sold for $93.60 (RRP = $89.9)

Until $80 there were more then 10 people still going.
5 people went until $90, and 3 battled for the final price.

money cow. or money tree.

> Why would you waste keystrokes on this? Who cares?

swoopo is the perfect storm of wild west "anything goes" internet business models, designed to make money by any means necessary.

Only on the internet..

> It's a strange combination of eBay, woot, and slot machine.

I had never been to the site but after watching for a few minutes, I totally agree with the slot-machine comparison. ::shivers ::

I think your chimpanzee article may have been shown to be improperly interpreted. It sounds very similar in the least.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08tier.html

Wow. They also selling an item called "50 FreeBids Voucher". You bid to win an action so that you can bid more. I guess the idea is that you could make bidding less expensive. This is utterly ridiculous..

This is one of the most common Poker misconception - "pot commitment". Basically, it describes people who put money in a pot, then get bad cards, but continue to call other peoples bets, because they feel they are "committed" to the pot, because they put so much money in it.

The simple truth most professional Poker players will tell you - there is no such thing as pot commitment. The same holds true here: even if you bid 100 times on something, and wasted 75 bucks in bids to get to, say, $200, you are still not off any worse if you just ABANDON that auction, and bid $210 once on a different auction for the same item instead. It only feels like you are bound to this auction.

Remember that iPod Touch I referred to in the post? Here's the actual item:

www.swoopo.com/auction/item/128263.html

The "winner", Xopex, paid more than the price of the item with 98 bids.

Worth up to: $229.00
Placed bids (98): $73.50
Final price: $187.65

The item page says that's a savings of 0%! Really it's a savings of -14% but who's counting..

Jeff,

I thought eBay did automatically extend auctions?

Anyway... on eBay.. you just bid once. Bid the highest amount that you would pay for the item. Your bids are automatically upped to your max bid.

So, bid as much as you are willing to pay, and .01 cent more you wouldn't care. Then deal with it if you loose buy .01. If you were willing to pay more, why didn't you make that your original bid?

BOb

That is fiendishly brilliant, I wish I was not cursed with a conscience.

And of course, what's to stop swoopo from bidding on items themselves?

I'd say "not much". In fact, it would benefit them mightily to do so.

1. There's no "cost" to them.
2. They'd panic those that have a vested interest into buying more "chances"
3. When the item finally sells, the price is inflated and the "bargain" looks even better.

Sunk cost fallacy strikes again!

reminds me altivi.com incident in turkey. many people were arrested.

They can't lose! Simply by ensuring the house places the last bet. As long as some schmuck places a bid each auction generates revenue.

Brilliant business model, but does not seem illegal. Actually, they website won't let you register if you live in certain states, so it looks like the laws are based on the state level.

I see it like a carnival game. In a carnival game, you pay $1 and get three balls. With these three balls you have to knock down 3 pins off a pedestal. If you succeed, you win an item that is worth far more than $1. If you do not succeed, you just played the game which cost you $1 and you got nothing to show for it - you can always try again for $1.

With swoopo, it seems like the same thing. You pay $0.75 for a chance to play a game. The game involves skillfully placing a bid at a time when others are least likely - where the cost has gotten high enough where people are not likely to bid, but not so high where you are not saving enough money to offset your risk of losing $0.75. If you succeed, you get to buy some nice hardware at a bargain. If you don't you can always try again for another $0.75.

This is all assuming they are running an honest operation according to their stated rules.

Caveat emptor indeed.

I think this is absolutely crazy.I have never heard of this web site what everyone seems to be losing money.I think if I was the people bidding I would just stop nowbecause it doesn't seem like you will ever get a good deal.

> There's something else at work here, though, and it's almost an exploit of human nature itself.

The whole ad industry is based on this principle. Nothing new here. People whining about swoopo are probably jealous. I mean here they are, a web start-up that actually makes money.

Uh, hey. People.
It doesn't matter if this is the worst, most evil thing in history. This is the United States. People have a right to be as dumb as they want, and other people have a right to take advantage of those dumb people, so long as they have given consent.
It's a good system to make sure that dumb people don't get too much money or power. So good job, Swoopo, for keeping us save from the idiots who would fall for your crap.

wow - fantastic analysis! I hit the site a couple times through ads, and felt like something was a little off - that 'entertainment shopping' / lottery / gambling angle is dead on, that's exactly what's going on.

It's not quite as clever as a system that encourages users to spend time creating online content against which advertising can be sold, without the obligation to pay for that time at a fair market rate.

Anyone want to bet that they don't display the remaining amount of bids you have?

As noted before, there was a very similar auction site in Turkey, called altivi.com.

I think the way altivi worked was even crazier than Swoopo. Every item had a ceiling price, and a bid price. You could bid any price below the ceiling price, and each bid cost you the bid price for that item (usually between 1 TRY and 20 TRY). In the end, the highest unmatched (meaning only the winner had bid that price) bid won.

It later turned out that the founders of the site provided backdoor access to their "friends" so that they could see the highest unmatched bid for any item. There were rumors of people winning two BMWs in a row.

Needless to say, the site was shut down (though it still says it's closed for "technical" maintenance), and the founders have been arrested.

I assume a large chunk of bidders would wait till it is just 1 secs left and click bid. This means there could be a number of people clicking bid right at the time it it hits 1 sec. This means from just 1 sec left I should jump up to more than a 15 secs multiple. Yet while watching it I see many times where it jumped only to 15 secs and dropped to around 1 sec, then back to 15. Something ain't right there!

I've never understood the Puritan attitude to gambling in the US.

Unless the system is rigged in a *hidden* way, there's nothing wrong with it, and to interfere (other than to verify against hidden levers) would be to curtail personal and economic liberty.

Barry, These kinds of sites are 95% rigged.
Often by the owners themself, since there are nobody "controlling" the rules for them, compared to an auctionsite, a gamblingsite and similar.

/Marcus

Sellers on ebay have little to gain for bidding on their own stuff as they risk it not selling... But on Swoopo... if they weren't already making obscene profit (There is a Nokia N96 16 GB (~$600) going for $1,272, which means they've already made $6,361 in bids, not to mention the fact that they get to sell it for at least twice its resale value when the action finally finishes) they COULD have employees with free bids bid on their own stuff, so then if the employee wins it, they get to keep the money for all the bids and don't have to actually go and purchase the item. That is if they are more evil than they already are...

What some commenters have alluded to, but no one has explicitly stated, is that you can run a site like swoopo.com without ever holding any of the items you "auction."

When the house puts the item up for sale, it costs the house nothing to raise the item's bid. (It costs the house nothing to buy an item from itself.) Now in an ordinary auction, the house gains nothing by buying from itself (reserves just prevent losses). However, swoopo.com collects a fee for every bid, which means they can make money on a no-sale.

Bad timing on my part--Dan wrote it before I did. Anyway, this means the site takes a loss only if they choose to--and I'm going to guess they choose not to. The key to extending their profit--because people tend to get bored or get wise--is to move the site around, using different names and hitting different regions.

Ok, not they're auctioning off $80 cash. How is that not illegal?

I see several like this. What is wrong with this? The "value" price is a little inflated (these are about 40 bucks), but other than that it is still a good deal.

http://www.swoopo.com/auction/kawasaki-cordless-screwdriver-set/126799.html

First off, it's brilliant. If they're bidding on their own items, that's shill bidding, and it is already illegal (it's a type of fraud). But if they're not bidding on their own items, I see no reason that this should be illegal. It's a game for suckers, but then so are slot machines. If they're disclosing the rules and playing by them, what's the harm? I could sell a stupid plastic kitchen gimmick on TV that costs me $1 to make and call it a $60 value and suckers would buy it by the truckload. Just because people overpay for something doesn't mean it should be illegal.

Not very ethical, but I don't think the premise of the site is, or should be, illegal. Pitting bidders from UK vs the US, making use of the sunk cost decision-making bias, etc, are simply clever business ideas. Like you say, caveat emptor. The bidders know what they are in for. They can see for themselves how the site works. Damn, I wish I thought of this idea myself.

"It's pretty clear to me that swoopo isn't an auction site. It bills itself as "entertainment shopping". I think it is in fact a lottery; the only way to win here is sheer dumb luck." There you have it. Lotteries are not illegal.

Reading my above comment I realise that I should add one thing: the site should be deemed a lottery and it should be made to represent itself as a lottery explicitly clearly, rather than a hybrid ebay auction style shopping site.

OMG I totally loved War Games. Fav movie of ALL time!

jess
www.online-privacy.se.tc

I don't understand why sniping is a problem for auction sites. Is it just that it's annoying and might cause customers to go elsewhere, or does it hurt profitability in some other way?

@ASDF: Lotteries are not illegal.

Depends on where you are. I know there are a lot of places where random businesses can't legally run lotteries (even though there are state-approved or run lotteries in some of those places).

They admit it is gambiling in their job postings:

"3-5 years product management in ecommerce or online gaming. "

<http://www.swoopo.com/jobs.html>

Not just the websites. There are "Reverse Auction" schemes working just like this. They work mainly through TV and phones (SMS + calls) although a web interface is provided at http://bid2win.in

What they are doing is illegal in most (all?) of the US.

The three elements that qualify it as an illegal lottery are all present. Chance. Prize. Consideration.

You pay to bid = Consideration
You may not win = Chance
You are bidding for an item = Prize

This isn't even close to a grey area, it's just illegal.

I mainly saw swoopo's ads on gmail. I got intrigued by the ad and clicked on it.

of course swoopo is too good to be true.
just search for "swoopo scam", you'd see tons of complains

As far as it being any kind of "lottery" - it's not. A lottery is a game of chance, that is - the key factor in any lottery game is some form of stochastic process (card deals, ball withdrawal without replacement, spinning dials, roulette wheels, dice rolls, coin tosses) that makes it non-determininistic. Bets are an indication of a gambler or lottery participant's confidence in their overall position versus other users' positions (or the house's position) based on _knowledge_ that the eventual outcome is non-deterministic.

In these "auctions", many of you seem to be missing the point - there isn't an element of chance. It is fully deterministic - except that the most of the variables that determine the outcome are only known to those running the "auction". Sure, there are _human_ elements that make it essentially impossible to predict the outcome as an end-user, but on a mathematical basis? No way is this a lottery or gambling - there are no actual _random processes_ that are intrinsic to the auction itself. The only random element is from the bidders themselves, which removes it from the definition as a "game of chance".

So "I think it is in fact a lottery" that is JA expressing an opinion, but not one based on mathematical fact. Whether "the only way to win here is sheer dumb luck" is true? I guess you'd have to ask the end-users.

Jeff writes:
"I've often wondered if eBay would implement this feature, as it would effectively end last second sniping, a huge problem for auction sites."

There's nothing wrong with sniping! Sites like eSnipe etc. essentially turn ebay into a "silent auction" site, where the bidders figure out the absolute maximum they want to pay, and bid just once. Auto-sniping spares the bidders from falling prey to "auction fever", and the price is set to the true value the bidders decide up-front that they are willing to spend.

Bidding early in an auction is a sure sign of an ebay newbie.

friggan badass if you ask me...i got a tv for 30 bucks and only spent 6,000 at the site that week...what a deal i got

This place is risky for anyone's money.
I'm staying away. Done.

Thanks for the heads up, I don't go in for online bidding much,but, have warned friends and family.

I've just watched a single bit on a Toshiba Notebook put up the auction time from around 10s left to 38m35s. Otherwise it would have gone for about $33.

I've also seen someone **outbid themselves**, and several bids go in at around the 10s mark which only add on 2s and a penny.

So this site is certainly a scam. This surprises me, because as Jeff's already said, working to its own rules the site would clean up anyway, so why add fraud into the mix??

These guys discovered how to sell $1,000 items at $8,000 while the individual customer pays $175.

That's really amazing. It is not illegal. If you think of it, it is the basis of the capitalist system, where a collective creates goods they can't individually afford for the benefit of surviving.

In this case, a collective pays the plus-value to the capitalist for the benefit of an under priced good that each individual would not be able to afford at face value.

this is at least 50 year old game theory.

i suppose it's funny that even with the answers out there, people still play.

Will someone write review like this, also to http://biddingmadness.com . In my opinion it's very similar auction site. And they have only s.c. centauctions.

If it wasn't illegal directly, it would be illegal to do this without a gambling license in the U.K.

A coworker of mine has actually fallen victim to this site. Snapping up his 8GB iPod Nano for a mear $120, but he had bid over 100 times.

And it's not that he isn't intelligent, but he is foreign.

I used to think puppy killers were evil... but no longer...

great post!!!

Ingenious, yes. Sleazy, looks like it.

But in the larger scheme of the world, our politicians, waste of tax dollars, lies we tolerate and so forth, this is very small.

How sad. It's people's own greed pulling them down... if EVERYONE would just get together and stop "fighting" to win. We could put this immoral site out of business by getting them to sell most products for under a buck. Unfortunately, as we see, greed is a powerful thing.

Nice to see user CaC03 biding the price up to over $1000 for a Pharos PTL600 GPS Phone on swoopo.com (Auction ID: 127325) and at the same time pushing an Apple iPhone 3G 8GB to over �500 on swoopo.co.uk (Auction ID: 127325)

No hint of anything amiss of course just a coincidence of course!

You'd have to be very gullible (and there are a lot of gullible people out there) to fall for swoopo.

First question is, why should you (or would you) pay the store to shop there? If you have to pay to play, you are gambling not shopping.

As a business model, combination of gambling and shopping is brilliant but it is no different than "lose weight fast" and "get rich fast" industry.

It just goes to show how many morons can afford a computer today and have nothing better to do with their time but to sit on their fat butts and gamble from comfort of their own home.

To those claiming this is not based on chance:

It is based on unknowable variables. If this is deterministic, then so is a coin flip or a roulette wheel- both are based on physics.

So, you think capitalism is evil?

What's wrong with a business model centered on making money?

To those claiming this is based on chance, go back to school and take that probability course again.

"Unknown variables" is NOT chance.

A game of chance is where the same action can result in different results. A coin flip returns two different results with equal probability. A roulette wheel has more results with lower probabilities.

Swoopo is NOT a game of chance. It is merely competition with money tied into it. There is only one action: pay and play. It always results in the same result: increase by 0.15 cents. There are no other possible results!

Another spooky website that does exactly the same rubbish: http://www.madbid.com , apparently registered in the UK. I wonder if this stuff is legal here.

This is an awesome site, an awesome real-life study in game theory, and it would be criminal to force it to shut down. (Does your condemnation extend to state lotteries?)

I've always wanted to run a dollar auction in real life. Here's something that did happen in real life, and I wish I could find a reference to it to back me up:

A magazine (Money?) offered a contest that you'd enter by writing down a number. The prize went to the highest number. The prize was a million dollars divided by the sum of all submitted numbers.

Obviously they were at no real risk, but it was interesting that they got entries which, even if they were the only entry in the contest, would have invalidated the prize. Like 3x5 cards covered with small-font 9's.

Online gambling is illegal in the US and this is definitely what Swapoo or other "lowest unique bid auctions" are (even if not yet busted by the authorities).

To be considered online gambling, you need 3 criterias:

1) A consideration. Here you pay to bid. It is like purchasing a lottery ticket and you are most likely to get nothing in exchange but 1 chance out of N to win.

2) A game of chance, which will determine who the winner is. While some may argue that bidding requires some skills and determinism, many states actually don't make any difference in their online gambling definition between skilled games and chance games. (Poker requires skills).

3) A Prize or the ability to win something of value. (or get nothing but wasting time and money).

This should be regulated as any other gambling business and not allowed to spread on greed and foolishness.

Many will pay to learn and eventually too much scam will kill this scam until a new variation or evolution of the scam comes around for new and fresh victims or short minded people.

Most scams are based on smart and sleek mechanisms. It does not make them right.

It reminds me of the guy that placed an ad in the news paper with:

How to become a millionaire?
Send 0.99 cents to receive the incredible secret. Success guaranteed or your money back.

I sent the 99 cents and received a letter saying: Just do like me! :-)

By the way, the stock market could fit the definition but at least it is supposed to be regulated. You pay, You Play and most of the time you loose.

> This kind of sites was found to be a lottery in Sweden and was banned, but the owners just moved to UK and runs it from there nowdays.

What was banned in Sweden was "least unique bid" auctions. IMO it's the same kind of crap but it works a bit different.
Instead of increasing the bid every time you bet you get to throw a bet at any price you want, every bid costs about $1. If your bet is the least unique one at a given time you will win the auction and have to pay with the bet you chose.

One of these sites (Bideazy . com) was hacked and the hacker gained access to both the sourcecode and the database for the site. It turned out that the owner of the site could see the bets himself and place bets so he won all the auctions himself if the lowest bet didn't suit him.
More information on the hack can be found here(in swedish): https://www.flashback.info/showthread.php?t=649489

Wow, this site must be crazily profitable. After reading your article I decided to watch a couple of auctions while I ate lunch. I watched a $130 Nintendo DS gross them $186.30. Which was a pretty impressive profit, but paled into comparison as I watched one of the "freebid" auctions. The concept of 100% off auctions is simply brilliant on their part, there's no cap to the bidding. In about 30 minutes of watching the auction of 50 bids ("worth" 37.50) it has been under a minute to go the whole time. It finally "sold" at a bid of $125.40, meaning people had spent $627, a profit of 1672%. Furthermore I saw an auction for $80 cash, that had brought in over 800.....These guys must have become millionaires in the first month, off of simple human greed and stupidity.

The key difference between being a lottery and being an auction is that in a lottery system you cannot guarantee yourself a win, no matter what you do or how many tickets you buy. Here, to guarantee a win, you simply keep bidding til everyone else stops. This may increase the price of the product beyond what you had hoped, but you ultimately have the final say as to whether or not you will stop bidding. This means that there is no "chance" involved in the process - unless, of course, you consider auctions lotteries as well.

"I see it like a carnival game. In a carnival game, you pay $1 and get three balls. With these three balls you have to knock down 3 pins off a pedestal. If you succeed, you win an item that is worth far more than $1."

If you check the catalogs, should be a internet site also, you will find that the standard carnival prizes cost less then the $1, or whatever they are charging for the game. The ones that allow you to "trade up" are of less value then the min number of items you would need to trade up with.

Great post, thanks for informing us Jeff.

Great post, thank you for show us the evil ones :)

but... with more than 28 million dollars in revenue ... there are a lot of crazy people out there in the web!!

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoopo

Here is another good deal:

http://www.swoopo.com/auction/guitar-hero-world-tour-band-bundle-ps3-/127943.html

Savings:
Worth up to: $189.99
Placed bids (222): $166.50
FreeBids (0): $0.00
Final price: $79.80
Savings: $0.00

One other thing, if you look at the bottom of the auction they have a shipping cost of � $19.90. Looks like this guy spent $266.20 on something you can get at the local electronics store for $150.

Swoopo is really good i think, I spent 50p worth of bids on an auction and won!!! The auction was for �40 cash and it actually came. To win you must not let yourself get carried away

I wonder if it is illegal in Australia? ...

Of course, they can be losing money on 70% of the auctions and still be Making Money Fast, just so long as they lose small when they lose and win big when they win.

Just another Mathematics Tax.

-----sharks

Good grief!
http://www.swoopo.com/auction/ds-nintendo-ds-lite-black/129451.html

Savings:
Worth up to: $129.99
Placed bids (220): $165.00
FreeBids (0): $0.00
Final price: $94.80
Savings: $0.00

Here's exactly why I think Swoopo is illegal:

One particular kind of "auction" on the site is called the fixed-price auction. That means that the winner will pay a fixed, pre-announced price for the item. The highest-bid price is meaningless.

So ultimately, the clock is meaningless (it can be extended by any user), and the bid-price is meaningless (the actual price will be the fixed-price). This means it is effectively a raffle, most similar to a pie-walk or a game of musical chairs.

But in every state I'm familiar with, raffles as a business are illegal, or classified as gaming/gambling. (Exceptions are typically made for boyscout troops, church groups, and other small operations).

I am convinced that with the Fixed-Price Auction, Swoopo is breaking gaming laws, especially the "no purchase necessary" clause on contests.

Given the amount of money they're making, I think this is a VERY juicy target for an ambitious AG or class-action lawyer.

There's a ton of these sites in Sweden at the moment. Several of them have been running for more than a year, taking out ads in TV and papers. There's been talk about trying to shut them down over legal issues, but so far nothing. And no doubt, they're making a TON of money.

ok, so you pay for your bids, and then you pay the final price?
Why would anyone ever do that? At least with a lottery you know, what you're paying and you only pay it once, and then you win what you win... with this thing even when you win, you still have to pay.

If people are actually falling for this, then I think I'll start charging admission to the box office at the movie theater

I think the best entertainment value of this show is for the person who knows what a ripoff it is, and just watches other people fall victim, sorta like a bar with a VIP room on the other side of a one way mirror (or whatever those cop-interogation-room mirrors are called) You get to watch other people pick things out of their teeth and fix their boobs...

When I worked at the now defunct Crocker Bank, a fellow once told me, "Son, if you're going to commit crimes for a living, start with the legal ones."

These folks, at least in their jurisdiction, seem to have taken this advice to heart. Of course, they are as nothing compared to the current crop of Bankstas and hedge fund managers, but they are clearly the logical outcome of that 80s-2000s mindset (Checkout the book "Liars Poker" for a clearer example).

so what? it's just like poker sites or anything else in life where you pay to get entertained; it's exactly what they advertise, "Entertainment Shopping".

they aren't lying to anyone, you pay for entertainment, this seems very fair to me and i don't see what's wrong whatsoever.

addendum: yes you'll never win anything but that doesn't change the fact that you got entertained; you didn't pay to win auctions but for entertainment.

This is a fantastic post. I saw this site a few weeks ago, and on the outset it looks like a novel way to do an auction site. I can see how some people might get suckered into it. A few minutes looking around though, and it comes across as a bit of a scam.

Reminds me of some crackheads who would come into the bar with this guitar and sell raffle tickets for it. Nobody ever won or claimed the guitar [no raffle occurred] and they would be back a week later selling raffle tickets again and people would buy more tickets.

"To those claiming this is based on chance, go back to school and take that probability course again."

Perhaps you should. Although the distinction you're making is valid in a practical sense, it's not theoretically correct. Probability is about information and is not dependent upon a physical definition of "chance". Asserting that it is pushes it into some very murky territory where, using contemporary physics, you'd have to appeal to quantum mechanics and, at that point, nothing is deterministic.

Anyway, whether this is a "lottery" for legal purposes depends simply upon the legal language used in the relevant law and the precedents involved. It doesn't depend upon an understanding of probability or physics or game theory or common, non-legal, language usage. We're not going to decide the argument about whether this is a "lottery" without consulting some particular law which arguably applies in a particular jurisdiction.

A raffle+auction; talk about eating your cake and having it too!

Down here in New Zealand, we don't have eBay. Instead, we have TradeMe:

http://www.trademe.co.nz/

and TradeMe does auto-extend auctions, by two minutes after the latest bid. Sniping still occurs, because bidding early is still a great way to encourage someone else to keep bidding until they're in the lead. There's still a flurry of activity in the last fifteen minutes or so, and I'd wager that sale prices are probably a little higher.

TradeMe also offers the seller the chance, after the auction has ended, to offer a fixed price to users who'd added the item to their watchlist. Quite often you'll see auctions terminate with no bids, or not meet reserves, as vultures circle, waiting to swoop on a fixed-price bargain.

Not sure if eBay offers this -- it's been a while.

Sligthly off topic: Last second bidding is NOT a problem. It's a solution, and the problem is sellers trying to up the price by fake proxy bids. This is *extremely* common on eBay. In fact, it seems more common than not in my experience.

I haven't bought anything in a long time of eBay, but I would not do it without a sniper software. In fact, I think eBay should introduce this as a service in their site.

Let's put the two threads here together: 1) quick seat-of-the-pants calculations tell us that swoopo is making an insane amount of money, and 2) swoopo is rigging the game by including not-real bids in the process.

I think swoopo is making money off of this, but not nearly as much as it seems from the alleged activity on the site, since much of that activity is almost certainly fake. There does exist some number of people out there that are so stupid that they dump their money into this hole, but that number is mercifully not as large as it seems when you look at swoopo.

I wonder how long will it takes before people realize they are wasting their time and money.

Still, it is an awesome idea.

In theory, some competitor will emerge with better terms, like 50 cent bids. This will repeat until some economic break-even point is reached.

Let's see how long this takes...

i'm systematically stuffing grapenuts cereal into the head of my erect penis. i'm going to attempt to jack off, have my load mix with the grapenuts, and shoot a granola bar out when i cum

My lord -- they did implement the dollar auction.

They will actually "sell off" $1000.

I found this a couple days back and thought to myself "wow, what an incredible idea." The fact of the matter is that you're unlikely to win, but if you pick your auctions right and get lucky, you can get some great deals. I notice you're not too familiar with the site, as I spent a mere ten minutes reading through their FAQ and yet I'm able to spot several bunches of "half-truths" or even blatant misinformation in your article. For one, the extension time isn't 15 seconds. It starts at twenty, and at certain points (in either time or bid amount-- I'm not sure which), it decreases by five second intervals to a minimum of ten. Additionally, I've yet to see a Free Bid Voucher auction that wasn't a "100% off" auction. As in, it's free if you win. Your whole "they're printing their own money" thing is absolutely bullshit. Have you never bought a gift card? Is Target printing their own money? This business plan is considerably less evil than any casino or lottery that has ever existed, namely because your chances of winning are more than likely in the whole number range. Is it a good idea to do your Christmas shopping on Swoopo? No. It it a good idea to bid on Swoopo at all? Probably not. Is bidding on Swoopo a much better idea than dumping money into your local lottery? Without a doubt.

Interesting article. We have a similar site here in Australia (www.realbargain.com.au) that advertises keenly on google. It works in a very similar way, except the bid system works slightly differently:
- You purchase bids in bulk (same as swoopo)
- The winner looses his bids on the current item, BUT
- Losers regain their 'lost' bids as credit against any successful purchase within 30 days.

Rip-off in my opinion, but makes for a great add. People picking up Nintendo Wiis for 'less than $75'... False advertising in my opinion.

How is this any different than a "live" auction?

This is how auctions have been traditionally done, excepting the bidding fee. Tracking and monetizing that (whereas live auctions TYPICALLY have a fixed price to attend) is in no way illegal or even misleading.

Maybe I am a little bit sarcastic, but I kind of fail to see the stated "pure evilness".
Swopoo offers stupid people to get rid of their money, completely transparent and fair.
The harm inflicted to anyone in the process is exactly the harm that person inflicts willingly to himself.

If the swopoo-owners just spend the money on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, i would even go so far to consider it pure good, because they prevent that the money the customers so desperatly want to loose goes to someone where it can do real harm, say, for example in politics.

Maybe it is indeed illegal in some countries/states, but the thought, that people who are allowed to vote actually need to be protected from "schemes" like this by laws is kind of frightening.

The world is a crazy place.

No, I do not think this is illegal in any legal sense. Similar companies have been operation this sort of services for some time now. In Finland we have had a similar auction site operating for at least one year now.

I have some other evil business plans which are also perfectly legal it seems. Here you go:

-pay-day loans, SMS-loans and similar schemes to provide easy short-term credit, for which you can charge 1000% interest annually.

-SMS-based "knowledge competitions" where you ask questions and the winner is, for example, the fastest person to answer them. Charge 3usd / SMS and select easy questions to get as many answers as possible. This is not a lottery (which would make it illegal in many countries, like here in Finland).

@Jack9: "How is this any different than a "live" auction?

This is how auctions have been traditionally done, excepting the bidding fee."

Errrm, it's different because of the bidding fee. The bit where everyone pays, not just the winner. The bit that makes it a gamble.

@keppla: "If the swopoo-owners just spend the money on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, i would even go so far to consider it pure good, because they prevent that the money the customers so desperatly want to loose goes to someone where it can do real harm, say, for example in politics."

I see a book deal coming: How to do good through scamming the stupid.

I enjoy swoopo. I have won 8 times, that's the limit in one month. The great thing is I didn't spend much at all.Actually im ahead $3000.00.

@Schmoo

As I mentioned, traditionally everyone pays in live auctions as well. Some entry fees are quite steep. This commoditizes the bidding as a dynamic fee IF you want to participate. I've gone to a couple auctions where I paid 25$ (small auctions) to end up not bidding on anything, I eventually went to other places and currently use Ebay/Craigslist/etc. I still don't see how this is special. People want to pay it? I'm watching these auctions and I KNOW people this stupid can't want some of this crap or be that frivolous with money. So what? I don't click on the free Ipod banners either. YMMV

>This is about as evil as the "win a free ipod" crap!!
Most definitely.

This is exactly why idiots shouldn't have money.

And exactly why they won't have it long.

For my former state (FL), and probably many others this would be considered a lottery or raffle. Which is decidedly illegal. I'm not sure how it is in other countries but if you have to pay for consideration. Then it doesn't matter how the prize is decided (Chance, final bid, or position of the sun). In fact, I don't think they consider anything else except for the pay for consideration part to decide if it's a lottery or not.

Where I can see them skirting around this is the fact that you have to buy your bids beforehand. I know some organizations got around gambling laws by making you pay flat entrance fee $20 or $50, in return you got tokens to play games, and at the end of the night you would exchange tokens for prizes.

Last-second sniping is never a problem on EBay if you understand how the site works. You enter your *maximum* bid on EBay, not your actual bid. EBay then updates teh bid price so whoever is willing to pay the most has the current top.

Example: You want a widget. The widget is currently set at a $10 bid. You're willing to pay up to $100 for the widget. On most auction sites, you would bid $11, since that's close to $10. On EBay, you're actually better off bidding $100 in the beginning. Here's why:

For that $10 bid, EBay will raise the price until someone is bidding the highest, without going over their maximum. So if there's one other bidder, who set his current maximum at $20, the bid will go up to ~$25, and you will have the highest bid. Note that your initial maximum bid was still $100, but you currently have a $25 bid on the item.

So when those last minute 'snipes' occur, if you placed the maximum amount you're willing to pay for the item as your initial bid, one of two scenarios occurs:

1. You win the item, without having to worry about trying to snipe someone, for less than your maximum bid, or

2. You lose the item, which is really OK, because the item cost more than you were willing to pay.

If people simply knew how EBay worked, they would never have to worry about being 'sniped' again.

@Jack9: On a practical level, an attendance fee is a fixed price with no opportunity, let alone enticement, to buy more. On a moral level, an attendance fee is to cover the use of the venue, and will accordingly be comparable to other events held in similar venues.

Swoopo's bid fees are a clever way of getting themselves paid by people who lose an auction. I can't see how you can hold these equal on either criteria?

@Crazy Ivan: Better still is to combine both approaches. Bid $11 early on so that a) you get notified on other bids and b) the seller is less likely (or not allowed, depending on the site) to cancel the auction.

Then leave your maximum bid as late as possible, so as not to encourage other bids. It's counter-intuitive, but people seem to ignore items with a low bid price until late in the auction. Too-good-to-be-true thinking I'd guess, but who knows?

In times of economic crisis, this information of this site is most disheartening. Normally I would respond with something quite like Daniel Cassidy posted. However, it seems these days, even the idiots in this country are affecting the smart ones.

So instead of sounding off and saying our population will work itself out in terms of natural selection, I will say the idiots will be the ball and chain around the ankles of the people that keep this country (and themselves) afloat.

On a completely different note, they took an auction site (like ebay) and charged people to bid. How dumb do you have to be to realize you could bid for free on ebay?

::Looks down at idiot ball and chains and sighs while drowning::

The problem with this kind of sites is that they can much too easily cheat. In Romania we have similar auction websites with 30 cents/bid, and I spent hours watching the bids: the result was: the website was cheating, using automatic bots to outbid human bidders; they even had several bots outbidding themselves, thus keeping the bid alive inspite of no real user actually adding any bid. Once in a while, the bots got renamed with some other nicknames, but keeping their bidding pattern.

To sum up, this kind of websites make a too big risk for the casual bidder - until some kind of authority can vouch for their fair-game, I'd recommend to keep an eye open for any kind of suspicious behavior.

I agree absolutely. Its 100% gambling period.

...and the UK site has exactly the same prices, in pounds, as the US one in dollars. (check swoopo.co.uk against swoopo.com) What's that all about?

@chrism

Haha, well I suppose they did not bother to get rid of the bugs, when they are just ripping people off anyway.

This reminds me of a fantastic book I have. It makes very interesting and thought-provoking reading if you're interested in this kind of "game":

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/019285321X?ie=UTF8&tag=ajsstuff&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=019285321X

I think there actually is a way to win at this. Unfortunately, it involves a DoS attack... :P

I'm surprised about all this defense of auction sniping. In particular, this comment:

"There's nothing wrong with sniping! Sites like eSnipe etc. essentially turn ebay into a 'silent auction' site, where the bidders figure out the absolute maximum they want to pay, and bid just once."

... um, isn't that how eBay's proxy bidding system is _supposed_ to work? In the _absence_ of sniping?

This is brilliant.

Like a casino, this service exploits a well-known bug in human thought processes, but in a way that doesn't *look* like a vice people have learned to avoid. (ie: It doesn't look like a casino.)

It's also horrible and evil, of course. But like most brilliantly evil schemes, I can't help but wish that I'd thought of it first.

"Sites like eSnipe etc. essentially turn ebay into a 'silent auction' site,"

Yes, they do. The problem is that ***PEOPLE DON'T LIKE SILENT AUCTIONS***. They prefer the more traditional type of auction where people can be against each other.

Sellers prefer traditional auctions because prices go higher.
Buyers prefer traditional auctions because, except for commodities with a well established market price, there is often no magic number that you would pay for an item but not fifteen cents more.

eBay tries to provide traditional auctions, but their failure to come up with a way to deal with sniping has made their service a sort of hybrid auction with all the worst features of a traditional auction and a silent one.

I think what people hate about swoopo so much is that it engages in the kind of scams that are usually the exclusive purview of the State. So people denounce it as a big Ponzi scheme, which are illegal...except for Social Security. Or it's a lottery, which are also illegal...except if run by the State. Or they have auctions for swoopo bids, which, as the author notes, "is swoopo printing their own money." Well now, who has the exclusive right to do that in order to raise capital?

Here's another one up this alley.

A danish service provider (Unotel) is having a christmas contest: The person who sends the most MMS messages in december wins an iPhone 3G.

This can easily be translated into an auction where every bid cost 25cent and the one who places the most bids, wins, the rest get screwed and the house wins big!

Worst part, it doesn't seem like its illegal according to danish law...

Re: last second auction "sniping"

Auction sniping is really only an issue in automatic proxy auctions, like eBay, when bidders don't understand how to properly bid. For a proxy auction you don't have to enter more than one bid. Simply determine the maximum amount you want to bid, bid that, and walk away. The system will do all the rest. If someone else bids higher than the current bid the system will increase your bid until it exceeds either your or their maximum bid, at which point you will have either outbid them or they will have outbid you, there is no need for your personal intervention at this point.

I suspect that people find it difficult to "let go" to the degree required for proxy bidding.

Proxy Bidding assumes that there is some magic number that one penny less and you're willing to pay, but one penny more and you're not.

This simply isn't true for most real-life, personal, purchases.

The type of auction most people WANT is an interactive, traditional auction. (And optional proxy bidding is completely compatible with this, but a hard-and-fast ending time is not, because it encourages "sniping".)

"Wedge", you are describing a system that already exists, and are trying to convince people that it's what they want, even though many are actively complaining about it. (I know this is a very natural instinct for us Computer Science types, but we're supposed to fight it.)

OK, I checked this out in its UK version and came across an auction for an iPhone which cost 40p (=c) to make a bid which raises the price by...1p. Yes, you read that right. See URL below.
http://www.swoopo.co.uk/auction/apple-iphone-3g-16gb-black-/130691.html
If all the bids are genuine, they've made �1,200 on a single iPhone auction that's still at �28! If all the bids are genuine...
It's a scandal almost on the scale of everyday banking, distinguished only by displaying its bankrupt morals right there on every page and *still* attracting customers.
Imagine this at a real auction house.
What am I bid for this lovely silver vase?
�100
Thanks for the money, the price is now �2.50.
What more am I bid?
�200
Thanks for your �200 sir. You might win the auction if you're lucky.
The price is now �5.
Any more bidders?
�300
Thank you so much sir! The �400 you've spent could get you this lovely silver vase for the bargain price of �7.50!
But wait...I've just had a phone call. A phone bidder is bidding �10!!! Care to drop another �100 to up the price by �2.50? You decide :)

The only people that consider eBay sniping a problem are those that actually want to be part of an auction. If, like me, all you want is get a good deal, then sniping is the *only* way to go, regardless of proxy bidding.

If I, a deal seeker, consider 100$ is a good price for a widget and an "auction seeking" individual bids 75$, they will realize that somebody else bid higher and they might, in a fit of irrational auction frenzy, keep bidding higher and higher until they bid 105$ and outbid me.

The result is I didn't get the item, the "auction seeker" got his "thrill" but "overpaid" for the widget.

If on the other I bid 100$ at the very last second, the thrill seeker won't have the time to outbid me. Result: I win but I've "ruined the fun" of "auction seekers".

Thus, if you're just looking for a good deal on eBay, the only rational course of action, WHICH TAKES INTO CONSIDERATION THE POSSIBLE IRRATIONAL ACTIONS OF OTHERS, is to snipe.

QED

I heard about Swoopo a few months back. I quickly Googled "swoopo clone" and found that nearly every result was somebody trying to hire a programmer to build them a clone.

So I built my own and now I'm grossing around $3 million a year (profit > 30%). It's nothing too big compared to Swoopo (because I'm lazy), but a pretty good deal for a 22 year old.

I don't know if it's "evil." I would have agreed when I was younger but giving it more thought, I've concluded that I either bank off people's stupidity, or spend my life in a cubical listening to a pointy headed boss who's banking off people's stupidity.

Please update the article with your views and facts on why this is illegal exactly, in the US or UK.

wow, ... now THIS is profit! - http://www.swoopo.com/auction/sony-vaio-vgn-fw140e-16-4-core2duo-vista/128836.html

Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E 16.4" Core2Duo Vista Laptop (Penny Auction)

Sold for $255.57

255.57 = 25,557 Bids @ .75 each -> !!$19,167.75!! + the final price of the laptop (255.57) = $19,423.32

minus the cost of the laptop to swoopo (1,149.99)

==== $18,273.33 Profit for Swoopo... Just damn, holy damn!

While swoopo seems to be doing something obviously Illegal with it's auctions, what about it's insane refresh rate of 1 second, even on the main page. That's gotta kill bandwidth on both ends over time.

Uh, you're all idiots if you think it's illegal, or going to be illegal at any point in time.

It should leave no worse a taste in your mouth than a raffle for a sports car in the mall where you buy x tickets for $10 each. You put in a little money and you have the chance of walking away with something you could never afford.

A raffle isn't obliged to stop anyone from buying all the tickets, even if someone was stupid enough to do so and pay more than the item was worth. About the only thing these guys might have to do is make it more obvious to the punters of the world exactly how much they are paying.

Swoopo doesn't force you to keep bidding. There's no lock-in. No coercion. Just stupid people.

What's your next target: Credit cards? Mortgages? Bloody reds...

I posted earlier about the lack of inherent chance, and yes, some people need a good dictionary - such as the meaning of "stochastic" - as well as a refresher course on probabilities. Considering the meaning of a priori and a posteriori probabilities in this context would be a good start.

Also, to the comments about the definition of "online gambling":
'To be considered online gambling, you need 3 criterias [sic]:

1) A consideration. Here you pay to bid. It is like purchasing a lottery ticket and you are most likely to get nothing in exchange but 1 chance out of N to win.

2) A game of chance, which will determine who the winner is. While some may argue that bidding requires some skills and determinism, many states actually don't make any difference in their online gambling definition between skilled games and chance games. (Poker requires skills).

3) A Prize or the ability to win something of value. (or get nothing but wasting time and money).'

Insert 'online stock trading' for 'online gambling' - I don't see that it reads any different: there's 'a consideration' [you pay to both buy and sell shares], there's 'chance' [companies choose to announce chapter 11 while you hold their shares, they go 2-for-1 split, they announce a dividend/ acquisition/merger, etc. which are all hidden variables unless you're Martha Stewart] while still requiring _some_ skill to make money from the market, and finally a 'prize' [the money you make from selling at a higher price than your initial investment.]

Regardless of the state of Wall Street ATM, it _definitely_ will never be considered "online gambling". Methinks you need to actually look at the statutes.

Finally, I'm not passing any judgement on the inherent "evilness" or whatnot of the site...that would be imposing my own _moral_ evaluations on not just the site, but those who use it and those who run it. I don't like those sort of judgements being made on me - I certainly won't do it to others.

All I can say after reading this post that it is a gamble, some one created this site to attract the gamblers, and making money. It is same like entering a casion, I suppose you have to pay some entry fee or something, I am not sure, then you 'play' and try to win.

I probably shouldn't feed into Mark, but...

> I posted earlier about the lack of inherent chance, and yes, some
> people need a good dictionary - such as the meaning of "stochastic" -
> as well as a refresher course on probabilities. Considering the
> meaning of a priori and a posteriori probabilities in this context
> would be a good start.

All of which is completely and utterly irrelevant, as well as
intentionally insulting.

"Stochastic" is not a legal definition, so a priori it is meaningless to
this discussion.

I find it ironic that you've set up "Stochastic" is the standard in a
computer programming discussion forum. "Random" is an ideal, not
achievable standard. "Stochastic" is, in fact, normally used in
precisely that context, events that are, **in theory** completely
determined, but in practice cannot be practically determined, so we
treat them, for terms of analysis, as "random". Comp-sci "random" is
usually referred to as "pseudo-random" because it is in fact totally
determined, but a decent enough implementation, and we can treat it as
"random". Again though this is immaterial to the this discussion.

IANAL, but I suspect Joe Chins comments about FL law, and the comments
you were responding to regarding "Consideration" reflect a much better
understanding about how the law works then anything you've posted.

Finally, though Wall Street clearly has a Casino flavor, in *theory*
what's being sold has intrinsic value. It is *not* identical in any way
with Swoopo. When I purchase a share, it's trade value may rise or fall
over time, but it maintains an intrinsic worth as a share of the company
in question. While the Casino elements tend to dominate in peoples mind,
purchasing stock does not trigger any of the standards set up by Scott
and Rick. It's a purchase of ownership, through and through. It's casino
elements only enter as a byproduct of repeated sales. A single purchase
is just that.

I do not know if Swoopo is in fact illegal, but I believe a decent
prosecutor could make a strong case.

Lol. Loved this:

"But, FYI� Swoopo loses money on about 70% of the auctions. So, we take a bit of a gamble in hopes that the remaining 30% of the auctions cover the costs of the products and our overhead."

I guarantee he is defining "losing money" as the winning bid price being less than their official MSRP value for the item. The 12x the cost that they got from unsucsessful bids? That doesn't count.

> Uh, you're all idiots if you think it's illegal, or going to be illegal at any point in time.

> It should leave no worse a taste in your mouth than a raffle

Bit of transferrence here I'm thinking. An actual smart person would probably know better than to try to pass themselves off as worldwide legal expert.

Perhaps such raffles are legal in the UK (I'm guessing from your vocab). However, for profit raffles are illegal in quite a few places in the USA. Here in Oklahoma for profit raffles are illegal unless they are run by one of the Indian tribes. Try reading over http://rafflefaq.com/united-states-raffle-laws/

Uh-Oh Hot Dog!

Why bother arguing about whether it's gambling or a scam and instead talk about whether you think the company's practices are defensible, or wrong, or whatever you think they are?

This post has a lot of potential for talking ethics and it's losing a lot of steam on semantics.

My problem with the company, irrespective of whether it's legal, is its exploitation of precisely the phenomenon Jeff Atwood names above: the endowment effect.

I don't know that I'd say people are being duped into employing the site, but I do think that whether those people are aware of this effect, and of the risk, doesn't speak to its justifiability.

Oh, and those people chalking the popularity of this site up to greed and/or stupidity ought to stop typing and pick up a book on behavioral economics.

I'm thinking 70% of the auctions could "lose money" even though it looks like they should be raking it in if they do internal bidding to keep the auction alive, since they wouldn't get any revenue on those.

Of course, they wouldn't be so evil as to do something like that, would they?

I got sucked in to a similar site. The difference being that if you are not successful in the bid they refund the tokens to you but give you a limited time in which to use them. After I wasted my first �10 on the site I gave up and got a real brain .

I don't get this bit about losing 70% of auctions. Dont forget that every bid has cost someone 40p (sorry i'm from uk) but only increased the bid by 8p. If you divide the winning bid by .08 (or in some cases .01) and then multiply that by 40p you will see that they are making a killing on almost every auction. If people are stupid enough to take part, then good luck to them. Hi from the UK to all.

"I'm thinking 70% of the auctions could "lose money" even though it looks like they should be raking it in if they do internal bidding to keep the auction alive, since they wouldn't get any revenue on those. "

that. They should only be loosing money on bids that fail to make 1/6th of the retail price. However, if every second big is internal, they will loose money on auctions that make less than 2/7th of the retail. If 4 out of 5 bids are phony, they loose money on auctions that make less than half of the retail. Not counting overhead here, but that should be negligible (they can just order the item from amazon after the winner pays them, amirite?).

If we assume that the 70% info was a moment of honesty, we could guess the amount of fake bidding that happens by comparing the (retail price) / (auction end price) historical data and looking at what the bottom 70% is. For instance, if 70% of the items go at below half price, we can surmise that 4 out of 5 bids are fake.

"My problem with the company, irrespective of whether it's legal, is its exploitation of precisely the phenomenon Jeff Atwood names above: the endowment effect."

You might as well bash companies for selling things with sexually-charged ads. Salesmen who use psychology to sell shoddy products. Any other business practice that tries to "hack" human behavior... Social networking sites? Political parties? WOW?

I for one welcome our behavior-exploiting overlords.

"You purchase bids in pre-packaged blocks of at least 30. Each bid costs you 75 cents, with no volume discount."

Holy mumble jumble, purchasing bids?! You have to be MAD! Crazy! Insane in the MEMBRANE!

To be buying bids to buy items that YOU MAY NOT GET.

I agree with Jacob from the third comment, they may be using a BOT just to get you to bid. And basically, we are just throwing money away to them.

However, when is there a good person who is rich?

I think it is about time to turn evil.

Thanks for a great read!

Bunch of crooks...
The owner of this should share jail with Madoff.
Interesting competition to see who steals more from the other one.

Wow. I'm gonna go sign up for this site. yehaw!

http://whois.domaintools.com/swoopo.com

The only way to beat this site would be with a collective agreement with ALL bidders to only bid once on all things on the site, thus winning everything for $0.75. Which would actually be kind of an awesome way to stick it to 'em.

But, um, would obviously never work. I like to dream big. :) Also, I guess not everything has the same starting bid? I dunno. Complications, complications. Whatever. It's a nice idea. Thanks for the post.

You need to realize though that it costs 75 cents to everyone bidding, not just you, and usually the starting price for each item is pretty low, only between $1-20. So some people will give up after spending around $5 at bidding, and you could get a $250 ipod for about $40-50 and thus make a profit, while the owner of the site also makes a profit.

Also, in your above example, I HIGHLY doubt that only 2-3 people made the entire 1,250 bids. They were likely made by many people and none of them spent more than $5-10 individually. Hence, the winner obviously still got a great deal. I would consider it a win-win-win idea.

And its completely irrational of you to say that this 'exploits' people. If you really think someone will get irrational and bid a lot just so they don't lose, i think you're talking vastly about yourself and you have some self discipline issues. This is just like saying casinos and gambling is unethical and should be banned.

I don't know which is sadder: Ignorant, sad, desperate people throwing thier money away at this site, or religious people (who are mentally similar) throwing their maoney away to their cult of choice.

This site demonstates survival of the fittest. Hurray for sites like this which take the money (power) away from those stupid enough to play.

@akos:

I *do* condemn those companies.

Hacking human behavior to sell people things, or to hook them on WoW, is a separate issue from hacking human behavior to give them absolutely nothing in return for buying bids. Swoopo's bread is that many people will compete for an item (and, of course, can loosely predict a direct relationship between an item's popularity and the competition that will follow); its butter is loss aversion.

Even those companies that hack people's behavior to sell them something I think is crap doesn't speak to the utility their crap provides the customers. For those people for which Swoopo is profitable, great. Those people who consistently bid on items they don't wind up should write on this forum about enjoying it; otherwise, I'll remain convinced that far more people are unhappy with their experience with Swoopo than are happy. Why would a business with that kind of record *stay* in business?

I guess because of those of us "stupid enough to play."

Finally, calling this "survival of the fittest" is myopic, trite and one of the most irritating phenomena regularly appearing in blog comments today.

There needs to be a __________'s rule of natural selection analogies, a corollary of which needs to be tarring and feathering of the perpetrator.

Also: using "survival of the fittest" to justify any behavior is engaging in the naturalistic fallacy, punishable by expository sandwich board.

Without a complete explanation, I can see the potential for someone to think they have it all figured out and spend their first $30 all for nothing.

this site is just a website to ascertain intelligence.
those who dont play are very intelligent
those who lose �10 fairly intelligent
those who lose �30 pretty dumb (me)
those who lose �50 thick
those who lose more.......... BRAIN DEAD

LOLOLOL

Re: Michael Wales: "My thinking is - you may be able to come away with a few deals on this site if you had a lot of historic data. If you knew an iPod sold for $100 the past 100 auctions, you could then immediately bid that amount and hope it was too high for others to bid, thus getting that item for $100.75 (with the price of your bid)."

That's not how I understand this to work. From what it seems to be, you just buy a right to increase the price by 15 cents, by paying the 75 cents. So for instance if the item started at say $10, and you wanted to increase it to $100, you'd have to buy 600 bids as soon as it started, for a total of $540. That's why they make so much damn money off this thing regardless of what the final price is. The reason that people get sucked in is they're spending 90 cents each tick, but they only see the 15 cents that the final price increases, and aren't comprehending that they're also spending an additional 75 cents EACH BID. That's why it's so bloody evil!

If I'm misunderstanding this, someone correct me.

Re: Akos: " Any other business practice that tries to "hack" human behavior... Social networking sites? Political parties? WOW?"

It's a fact that the people who play WOW the most are those who are the worst at it. Blizzard (the creator of WOW) did nothing more than create an absolutely gigantic game with the promises of advancement in a thousand different ways. The reason a lot of people seem to have problems and get "hooked" on it is because they are so bored with the rest of their crappy lives, that a totally different life where they cannot lose, where there are really no devastating consequences to messing up, and where they can be who they "want to be", is just overwhelming for them. The reason that its so damn obvious that it happens to all kinds of people with WOW is because the game was created to be accessible to everyone (aka easy), while most other games downright required the investment of time to get anywhere.

This is a similar situation as the people at old-time parties that used to bet even odds (assume the party had 50 people), that two people would have the same birthday. The probabilities say that yes, two people will most likely have the same birthday, but intuition is that this bet is the same as a person having a specific date as a birthday, which is false.

The war of attrition is nothing new to people, it is taught in a rudimentary game theory course. This site just finally puts it into practice, and is making a lot of money at it. It is nice to see a practical example of this type, just don't try to'beat' it.

i think (i haven't tried this, and i will not try it, since obviously you lose money every time you place a bid (if the site makes money, obviously you lose money)) if you only go for items that are already far more expensive than what they usually sell for (on that site) you can get some decent deals.
however, i don't think even i could stop myself from bidding on an ipod that's priced at $5.

This company can essentially place a bid on their own, and literally outbid everyone, AND still make $.75 of the bidding fees they charge. They don't even have to ship the item or anything. This seems like a scam to me.

You can bid all you want. All they have to do is have their script "swoop" in and make sure they have the winning bid. They don't have to ship anything and still be able to charge their hefty fee.

Many great comments in this thread! Those who focused on the "raffle" idea are the most precisely right.

But a raffle disguised as an auction. Brilliant!

SWOOPO appears to have the same elements as an illegal lottery (payment, results are based on chance, and a prize to the winner) except in an ordinary lottery (or street corner numbers game!) the size of the pot distributed among the winners gets bigger the more people pay to play. In SWOOPO, in comparison, SWOOPO participants can purchase an infinite number of chances, but at most one wins. That's what makes it a raffle -- and what makes the payoff to the promoters potentially huge, since they can, in theory, receive an infinite number of payments for bids and still only have to give away a single iPod (or whatever).

SWOOPO must know they're going to face challenges. So what's their plan?

SWOOPO claims they are providing "entertainment shopping," and uses auction language as a way to point out how many people lavish hours on eBay without ever winning (to imply, perhaps, that SWOOPO is selling that experience too). But that's an easy fiction to see through. SWOOPO is perhaps providing entertainment (the entertainment of a raffle), but hardly shopping.

And SWOOPO may have a way to claim they're not providing a raffle. In a true Raffle, the more tickets you buy, the greater your chance of winning. In SWOOPO, you either win, or (more often) not, and you know the results immediately. Buying more tickets doesn't improve your odds. That might take SWOOPO outside the scope of some of the State laws against Raffles, but it would seem to make it only more criminal -- making the connection between payment and reward even more tenuous.

They fact SWOOPO may lose 70% of the time (when the cumulative value of the bids is less than the cost of the item won) is possibly a clue to their planned defense. I suspect those losses are a key component of the challenges they must know they're going to face.

This will be a fun one to watch!

Charles

Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" (1911):
LAWYER, n., "One skilled in circumvention of the law."

===========================================
THIS POST IS FOR INFORMATIONAL AND DISCUSSION
PURPOSES ONLY and does not constitute legal advice

By the time they sort it all out, the founders will be on a beach drinking margheritas. Genius!

WOW! I came across swoopo purely by accident while purusing EBay and a promo on a seller's website. Sounded good so I went to Swoopo, read all the info. and signed up. Went first to the 'beginners' auction to place a bid and got a pop up saying I had to buy some bid stuff before bidding. First suspicion! I'd read the Terms and Conditions and did not think much of all the legal mumbo jumbo. But decided to check further and so glad I did based on the information I read here. It makes a lot of sense and it truely is NOT an auction site since it would cost me $.75 per bid - upfront- YEOW! it finally hit me this was, um, somewhat 'unconventional'. Ah, the naivety of the human mind LOL. Thanks for all the posts and saving me from entering some 'contest' that is far from any deal except for Swoopo! As someone said above "if it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is". Happy holidays to all!

"By the time they sort it all out, the founders will be on a beach drinking margheritas"

That could be the plan!

Swoopo supposedly launched a UK website in December 2007, another in Spain in May 2008, and the US and Austria ones in September 2008.

That's a lot of margheritas already in the bank. :)

- Charles

===========================================
THIS POST IS FOR INFORMATIONAL AND DISCUSSION
PURPOSES ONLY and does not constitute legal advice

More thoughts....

While the law varies from State to State, in general in the USA only States legally can run lotteries; so to the extent SWOOPO fits this model...

- to participate you have to pay

- whether you win depends on chance

- winning means getting something of value (money or other prize)

it is potentially a "lottery," and criminal.

SWOOPO is a particularly greedy type of lottery, because unlike a corner store numbers game (where the more people play, the bigger the pot split among the winners), in SWOOPO no matter how many participate, there's still only one prize. That makes SWOOPO potentially a sort of raffle, which generally cannot legally be run for profit. http://rafflefaq.com/can-a-for-profit-business-or-individual-run-a-raffle/

I'm not saying there's no room for debate about whether SWOOPO is illegal, but there's not much room. Consider the ways SWOOPO is different from a raffle (and maybe different enough to avoid the rules that apply to raffles):

- SWOOPO is disguised as an "auction," so instead of buying a ticket, you buy a "bid." But to win, participants need to do more than *just* buy a ticket (the way a true raffle works); they need also to:

-- 1) time when they make their bids, and

-- 2) choose how many bids to make (by themselves, or using an automated "bid butler").

But does that make SWOOPO a game of skill, and not an illegal game of chance? Without doing more research, I'm skeptical, and in some States buying a ticket to play a game of skill can be illegal.

- While a raffle can sell an infinite number of tickets for a single prize, that's only theoretically true for SWOOPO, where each bid advances the auction price by 15 cents. After enough bids, the auction price will exceed the prize's true value, and participants will eventually cease bidding. That may also take SWOOPO out of the narrowest definition of a raffle, but probably not enough to make it legit.

- SWOOPO claims to lose money on a large percentage (I believe 70%) of its "auctions." That's good for the winning bidder, who may get a bargain, but no so different from real raffles (which might also raise less money than its prize is worth). And even when a SWOOPO winner gets a bargain, SWOOPO can still profit big by taking in many times the item's value. Check out the example on Wikipedia:
"an item retailing for $200 may be sold at a 65% discount for $70, saving the winner $130. In the process of the price reaching $70 there will have been 465 bids placed, costing bidders a sum of $348.75. With $70 from the winner and $348.75 from bidders, Swoopo received $418.75; bidders, in total, paid $218.75 more than retail for the item."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoopo
SWOOPO only launched in the USA recently -- in September 2008 -- so whether State attorney generals or others start asking these srts of questions remains to be seen.

- Charles

Who cares??? All i know is that this is genius. Whoever made this Swoopo site is sitting back enjoying life...wish i would have thought of it...

Nice post. Pretty ingenious even if they didn't originate the idea.

The process is pretty misleading and greedy, but I don't think it's illegal.

The site will probably get a bad rep after a ton of people have bad experiences. By then they would've cashed in big time.

As for losing money on 70% of the items this is easily explained. I heard Elton John waaaaaaaaaay back in the 70's (before you were born, remember kids? "George Carlin") when he sold over 200 million records say this when asked about how much money he had to pay in taxes, which at the time was supposedly about 80% of his income; "I manage to live quite comfortably on the other 20%." Wish I could find the quote but like I said it was the 70's and no one could find anything!

Point being that Swoopo can say that they lose money on 70% of their auctions because the other 30% could easily be paying for the whole business and still make the creators rich. If there are items being bid on enough times for a $1000 laptop to sell for $6000, even assuming that Swoopo is paying full retail for the item (which they are not) they are $5000 ahead... on that one auction! So it's easy to imagine how they can lose money on 30% of the auctions as long as they make outrageous profits on the other 30%.

Of course I meant "So it's easy to imagine how they can lose money on "70%" of the auctions as long as they make outrageous profits on the other 30%.

See a lot of people saying that swoopo could be bidding themselves to inflate the price cos it would 'cost them nothing'. I doubt it. If you ran this business and were making $20,000 a day running it honestly why risk it being shut down by being dishonest. They could run this at huge profits till the end of time or make a little extra for 6 months and then get done for fraud. Plus if I ran the site I'd want as many winners as possibly to 'evangelise' my site

This is one of those parts of human nature that make government necessary.

I see alot of people slagging off swoopo. These are the greedy people that also believe that you get things for free in this life and that money grows on trees! Nobody just gives away products at the end of the day. Swoopo is a gamble there is no way you can guareetee that you win an item without spending alot of money. But read all of the free information they give you and are very upfront about and then work out how to win an auction without spending more than what the item is worth. People aren't happy enough to be winning an item for half of what they'd pay for it in the shops are mental if you ask me. YES Swoopo are making a killing but so can you if you use your head!

I think it is a great idea for a way to make money that doesn't effect single users much but it still seems really unethical to be honest.

I have no problem with anyone making money from a good idea. I do have a problem if it picks on the vunerable or stupid people who bid and even try to outbid each other when 10 hrs or more is still on the clock. I feel advice should be given when people buy bids and make them aware.

The biggest provable scam is the countdown clock when close to the end of the auction, you can bid last couple of seconds all through the auction,as I did, (26hrs)I was after a laptop (�1300 worth)and was willing to go up to half it�s price inc bids. It got to the time when, if you watch the play, bidders dwindle or come and go(after a while they become almost old friends dropping by), then you have your die hards and bidbutlers, if you try and bid, last 3 secs in my case, the countdown will freeze and, whooops surprise surprise you lost the auction, I lost �250 on that occasion.
I has happend to me on 8 other occasions, when I complain, I am told it is internet lag and there is nothing they can do about it, but the thing is, bidbutlers, which they like you to use because they take your money in seconds, also in my case bidbutlers won the item simply because bidbutlers can place a bid last second but if you single bid you have to bid 4th second at latest or lose it.
I like to bid last seconds because it draws out the single bidders also waiting for last second bids, then you start to learn your competition.

There are probably 100s of single bidders losing auctions in this manner and just accept it.
If you want to complain send to NIGEL WHITEOAK who is the top man for uk. If you google him you will find his profile and address.

I would just like to add that their was 7 other single bidders doing just the same as me, bidding last seconds so as not to waste bids and make the others bid first, so all seven either stopped bidding at the same time? or just like me the item was basicly stolen by the bidbutler, because he is not restricted by what they call 3second internet lag, I do'nt think so!! so if this is the case then can't all those losers who could have been possible winners sue the company because, nowhere in the terms and conditions does it say anything about internet lag. It'all bull and they are praying on fools who have absolutly no idea of what they are doing, and ther is an awful lot of them.

Here is One of my mails to them and the answer I recieved.........

Hi Julie,
>
> I apologise for being a bit offish with you, I am just trying to point out
> what seems to be a possible bug,problem. I am not after recompense for my
> losses but if there is a bug or problem it is in your own interest to check
> it out. Maybe I am wrong but I would like an answer as to how 7 different
> auctions did the same thing to me. In condensed format below..............
>
> When only myself and bidbutler are left to bid and I bid last 2-3 seconds
> the bid is not accepted and the bidbutler wins.?
> My strategy for bidding last seconds is just to see if there are other
> single bidders also waiting to bid last second. So by logical conclusion
> ,there were either no other single bidders, which would have left myself
> and bidbutler to fight it out, this is when I would play my bidbutler,or we
> were all victims of a timing bug.
> I had option of all my bids credited back to me if I won, so I had no real
> reason to let this item go by doing a stupidly late bid, I only bid the same
> way I had been bidding for the previous 26 hours sat in front of the
> monitor. (it's a long time) Julie, all I ask Is for you to escalate this
> and look at it with the view I might be right!
>
> Your uk country manager Nigel Whiteoak has said in interviews that to win on
> Swoopo you need a strategy and you can bid right down to the last second,
> which was also seconded by his US counterpart, which is True until you do a
> last second bid and it just so happens its you and bid butler and no other
> bidders then the bid is not accepted, as I stated earlier. but no probs if
> you are bidding against a single bidder.
> I love playing Swoopo, but to lose so many auctions and losing such a lot of
> I money. Particularly on the last auction for the laptop.
> Regards and happy christmas Mal

The answer....

Even when a BidButler places his bid in the last two seconds, the timer will
always reset to a minimum of ten seconds, giving other bidders the chance to bid.
I have escalated your issues, but our technical team has informed me that there
were no technical issues. As I've said, it's something inherent to internet use. I
understand just how frustrating lag can be, but with the current state of
technology, it's impossible to eliminate the problem completely.

I am very sorry that your bids weren't registered in time, and hope that you
understand that we can't refund the bids, as we cannot be held responsible for the
lag you experienced.

Kind regards, and merry Christmas,

-Julie

Well that really clears it up, does'nt it? I do'nt even know if the winner really existed. At least on ebay you can see a profile which could be followed up.

As there seems to be no way of making an official grievance, I presume it must be a bit suspect!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good Luck

Thank you so much and I am glad that I read this Forum. Regardless of my education (P.h. D Mathematics), the fact is that most people (like me) are just lured by cheap prices. Sometimes we just don't bother to read all the facts and the strings attached because we are blinded by these deals. I wanted to read a little more into these things before actually applying for an account (w/ Swoopo) and I am grateful that I ran into your posting.

Similar sites are on their way, in Poland we got Fruli.pl which operates basically the same way, you buy one bid for 1PLN + VAT (this makes 1.22PLN) but the bid is actually worth 0.08PLN(!).

next one: http://biddingmadness.com

i wonder how many are there?

people get upset because they think they can get a TV for 10 bucks, but that never happens on swoopo! if you just use common sense along with some 3rd party research on the site, you won't lose all your money. just don't waste your bids early and use sites like http://www.swoopomanual.com for research and you'll do WAY better.

There doesn't seem to be any way to prove that the owners of the site themselves are not bidding on items, which would cost them nothing and drastically inflate the bid total.
http://novhouse.ru/

How crazy can it get. Bidding going way over the list price for laptop.
http://www.swoopo.com/auction/samsung-nc10-10-2-netbook/146637.html
$499 netbook that actually went for $568.
Then add $430 in bidding costs. Buyer paid $998 for $499 machine.

what you are all missing:

when i win a $2000 TV for $.75 + $70 Auction with my ONE LUCKY BID!

i know, it's too good to be true...

So recently gave into the temptation and bought my first and the smallest bid package. I was looking at the nice cameras, and i noticed this one user "Phaeton123" who had bid butler set up on 2 of the cameras. I wouldn't think this person to be new in that they had well over 2000 dollars in bids and who would be new to the whole thing and have that much money to start with. Well, he/she just won the one nikon D90 and paid double what it would have cost for 2 of them on ebay and is still allowing the bid butler to work for them with the second nikon D90 and i'm sure has already overpaid in bids alone though the final price is still well under msrp. So i thought.

THIS bidder must be an in house bidder. Other people are still bidding and they would be making all sorts of money off the other peoples bids and if the in house bidder wins, which this bidder seems determined to do even if they arn't getting a good deal, then swooopoo still gets paid and doesn't even have to deal with the camera...
I know there are for sure legit deals, but this person (Phaeton123) has to be the stupidest person to bid like they are or really smart and unhonest because they are in house bidders.

perhaps phae is just full of money and likes to give lots of it away... could be the case

"First question is, why should you (or would you) pay the store to shop there? If you have to pay to play, you are gambling not shopping."

Ever heard of Sam's club? I know what you're trying to say here, but your analogy falls flat.

I did a null search for connection and speed, but apologise if anyone's made my comment. The winner's bid is at the top when all the hundereds of bidders-all of whom do not click before the last nanosecond-yawn and miss the end of the auction. (That answers why no one can chat with each other)

I would have a good chance of winning if my connection speed was infinate and I hit bid after 2-3 others in the last nanosecond. But my timer goes blank in the last seconds so I count down manually.

I have to guess how slowly the time got printed on my screen when I start my manual count. At the times when one bidder is riding it down to 0, I either "hope" or try to hit at the last nanosecond because the win must be stopped. I thereby reset the clock.

One question is when to try to put myself on top without being knocked off or resetting the clock. The Bidbutler might help, but bids a bit randomly in the last few seconds (and resets the clock). Has anyone watched BB's bid to gage if it's done with the autobid?
It could not win if it always resets the clock.

Has anyone at Swoopo addressed the issue of their processor speed?

Can they know out of all the signals received, the one which was generated first but had a slower connection. If the BB's random time to bid falls within the last nanosecond is it always the top bidder (to ride the clock down again) or do other signals arriving at the last nanosecond have a chance? I understand it is random but want to know if anyone knows upon what degree of finess it operates?

This site reminds me of the black-bag electronics "auction" I went to years ago in an empty storefront in Oxford Circus. A fast-talking auctioneer would yell at the sizable crowd to get in on the bargains, then the winning lots would be passed through the crowd in black trash bags and cash would be handed to the front. Who knows what anyone even won in the end? Or if the winners were suckers, er, customers, or if they were all crowd plants? It was great entertainment to watch, but you'd have to be crazy to participate.

There are blog postings similar to this one throughout the Internet regarding the relative merit of Swoopo, and while I think it purposely constructed to skirt the very edge of legality, there are some conspicuous elements that I think tend to belie the fact that is absent the transparency of most legitimate sales sites.

Swoopo avoids posting three critical pieces of information. First, the start time of an auction is *never* posted; second, the times of the most recent bids is never reported; second, there is nothing to validate the legitimacy of any bidder. That is, just as a "BidButler" is supposedly the automated bid of a given Swoopo user, there is nothing to demonstrate that anyone else's bid isn't just as automated. A count of viewers and distinct bidders would also be useful as well.

Swoopo's own site design is intended to create defacto "denial of service" attacks on itself, which is a brilliant ploy to create plausible deniability that any one "legitimate" player's bid was never received. Because many Swoopo users wait until the last second to click the "bid" button, the confluence of multiple users (across the many auctions simultaneously running at any given moment on Swoopo) is the very definition a denial-of-service attack. This would make it ridiculously simple for Swoopo to route auction "victories" to certain individuals, which then creates the problem of user transparency. Swoopo could create unlimited numbers of artificial bidders with infinite bids to prop up selective auction. The fact that there are some conspicuous "bidders" who have spent, apparently, thousands of dollars of bids in parallel auctions strongly suggests that at least some of the "insane" bidders may not exist - hence a further need for some sort of user transparency. Unfortunately, Swoopo knows that kind of transparency is very difficult to provide.

If anything is purely illegal about Swoopo, it would almost certainly be the "auctions" for cash. They are literal contests for money wherein the only chances to win are available via - surprise - spending money. In Vegas, at least you have some concept of the odds against you.

My guess is that, ultimately, some legal entity in the US - perhaps an individual state - will declare Swoopo to be a raffle or lottery, and thus prohibit operation in their state. That may well spread to other states, and Swoopo will, itself, have finally "Ended."

The bottom line is, if you do not like this site, do not play. If you want to play make sure you understand the rules. Take some advice from sites like www.swooposchool.com . There are also some paid e-books, but I am not sure if they are any good.

Awesome post! I'm glad there are people out there who are willing to make other people aware of such sick scams.

Also, about their shipping, if you believe it hasn't gotten any worse, I looked at some of their "products" and they actually charge a delivery cost as well. Just thought I should add that in there. Someone might have already said something about that though.

Stay away from Swoopo!! I bid on a Canon camera a few weeks ago on Swoopo. As it was getting late, I created a BidButler (a device to place bids automatically for you up to a specified number of bids and a specified price). I authorized 200 bids, at 1 cent ber bid. My BidButler promptly bid all of the bids that I authorized, PLUS ANOTHER 20 BIDS! Not only that, but the bid price on the camera went up only about $1.80 - since the BidButler bid 220 times for me, the bid price should have gone up at least by $4.40 (my 220 bids plus the bids from the person(s) against whom I was ostensibly bidding). Not realizing what had happened, I authorized another 100 bids. This time, it used up all of 100 bids almost instantaneously, but the bid price went up only 1 cent.

When I reported what had happened to Swoopo customer service (a misnomer if ever there was one), they basically said that everything went just peachy and it was too bad that I didn't win.

I don't know if there is a deliberate attempt to defraud customers, or if their bidding algorithm is just seriously flawed, but I would not spend your hard-earned money on Swoopo.

Ok so I am truly confused.

I won an auction on swoopo. I won it for $4.50 and my shipping was $4.90.

However, when I confirmed my win I was charged $37 for bids placed? I only made like 5 bids on it. That seems rigged to me. (No, I have not received the item yet, I'll let you know if I do.)

Now my funny story. I decided "Hey, I got a win let's go waste the other bids and never deal with this site again."

I just watched the biggest scam with bots ever. A character Hfwbw1 was using bidbutler. The characters rikarli and acrimidart (don't remember them exactly) were the auction savers.

Here is how it worked. Hfwbw1's bidbutler would go off at around 5-10 seconds. However, if the timer reached 1 second, rikarli and acrimidart would both bid to save the auction. I watched this go on for about 2 minutes and then jumped in knowing it was a scam simply because I wanted to get rid of my last 10 bids.

So, what happens? Hfwbw1 would bid with bidbutler then I would bid immediately after him, if the bot messed up and missed his bid (maybe it's on a timer) the other two bots would save him at 1 second by bidding and adding time to the auction.

AS SOON AS my 10 bids were used up, the bidbutler immediately won the auction.

The site is a scam, I have no idea how I actually won an auction. Don't waste your money or time.

Ok, so I just received my item.

What's funny? Swoopo just went on amazon.com bought it and shipped it to me.

Recount:

$37 for bids
$4.50 for item
$4.90 for shipping

Absolutely no savings. The item is only worth $39.99

If you don't like Swoopo, then simply don't use it - easy :)

i agree with the rational people here: there's not a single evil thing - nor even a mildly distasteful one - being done by swoopo. if they claimed their site worked one way while it in fact worked another, if they did not disclose the way it works up front or somehow misrepresented how it works, i could buy into the "evil" bit. but swoopo does none of that. they tell you how the site works, and that's how it works. where's the evil in full disclosure?

if you've never heard of poker before, it's not the dealer's responsibility to tell you you're not allowed to play until you know the rules. it's not the responsibility of the person sitting next to you at the table. it's YOURS, and nobody else's. if you want to sit down and piss all your money away while having no clue which actions make you money and which ones lose you money or why, then that's your choice, and - barring the most extraordinary sort of luck - you'll get exactly what you deserve out of the deal. if you fail a math test in school, who's responsible? the person administering the test? i don't think so.

if you don't understand how swoopo works, if you don't understand the possible consequences of your actions at swoopo, if you don't understand exactly how YOU are spending YOUR money, then the onus is on YOU to stay away from the site until you do understand it. blaming swoopo for any losses you sustain is the same as blaming the dealer for the losses you sustain at that poker table, or blaming the test administrator for your failing grade. in a word, preposterous.

the same goes for people who do understand the rules but are simply incapable of controlling their own spending. people who have a problem with this business model are just trying to shift responsibility for their own losses - or, even more egregiously, for their own and *other* people's *imagined* losses - off onto swoopo rather than place the responsibility with the responsible party: the person spending the money.

i've always considered myself more or less a Democrat, but posts like this really make me start to see what some people don't like about the Democratic philosophy. it's like the overbearing Mother who protects Her children from the world to the point that they never grow up. some people, like Mr. Atwood here, are unable to distinguish between threats from an outside source and those posed by one's own personal deficiencies, and are similarly unaware that each of these types of threat must be handled in a different way. threats from outside must be opposed and, ideally, stopped in their tracks, while threats from within oneself can only be effectively banished through self-knowledge and self-improvement. Mr. Atwood, in what i guess is often the Democratic fashion, is advocating the use of the first type of defense against the second type of threat. he's saying that, rather than equip children to deal with the world, we should allow them to remain ill-equipped and simply prevent them from encountering that world.

that's...not healthy.

Very well put Walt.

I believe this is a form of gambling. I recently tried Swoopo and won a laptop, after winning, my bids I used during the auction were returned to me so the only thing I paid was the ending auction price. So the person who is willing to invest the most money will win the most auctions at great prices. There are hundreds of people going on bidding anywhere from 500 to 3500 times to win an item worth $1000 and only paying the final price of $85 plus shipping. These people win there 2 items for 28 days and then come back on and do it again.

i have swoopo and madbid script > info gruici_bogdan@yahoo.com 180$/copy

@Walt

You fail to recognize the fallacy of your argument.

Comparing swoopo to poker is only a legitimate comparison if you truly compare it to how people complain.

The complaints are that the bidbutlers are fake and there are fake accounts bidding items up.

Your poker analogy works if the dealer is purposely dealing you good cards while making sure his friends have better cards.

There are countless stories of people watching the bidbutlers/fake accounts bid 100s of bids on items only worth $30. This does not make sense in any way, shape, or form.

I don't argue the idea behind swoopo and it is very genius and profitable. However, if you use illegal manners to achieve your goal, then your company should be exposed and shut down.

So, the blog is this form of exposure.

I think Swoopo's terrific and terrible at the same time. I've spent $50 in tokens and have gotten $80 in swag for $10, and I still have 30 bids left over. I do admit, it is difficult to tear myself away when I know I should cut my losses. People can call it a scam, but it's not. It works so well, it doesn't need to be a scam.

There's a site similar to Swoopo (except legal): www.pricedrip.com - Check it out. I don't know if it's a scam or not but it SEEMS on the up and up.

Yep, Swoopo competition is mushrooming. I just found another one www.bidrodeo.com. It looks like they are launching soon.

This is like running a casino. People that play know the odds are against them. They still play. It's about the fun/excitment, the possibility that YOU could beat the odds.

trading the stock market has negative expectancy as well, if you count in trading costs (against just owning the index like the S&P 500 or the MSCI world, with almost no trading costs) Is running the NYSE immoral?

http://xrumer-palladium.blogspot.com/

Hey guys,

I see there is a ton of confusion on here regarding Swoopo. Perhaps you can benefit from my blog over at http://blog.swoopostrategyguide.com or even check out the ebook that defines some strategies to help win swoopo auctions at http://www.beatswoopo.com . Wish you the best of luck. :)

Cheers,
Dave

Good article, nice one.

This kind of sites was found to be a lottery in Sweden and was banned, but the owners just moved to UK and runs it from there nowdays.

Most of them got hacked and people noticed that the owners had tons of fake accounts making bids so there was no winners on it except the owners that took in the cash.

So, these kinds of sites are really more or less just scams!

Tom Green

http://www.personalfinancegate.com

People are certainly calling it a scam, but in a different sense of the word. This is the same way someone might call your state lottery a scam. Your buddy might say, "Don't play the lottery, you will never win. It's a scam." Now everyone knows that a lottery is not scam. The rules are laid out clearly. The chances of winning are extremely slim.

John Blissed
http://websites-for-sale.e-unlimited.net

testing to see if i may comment without having a website.

wouldn't it be nice if i culd purchase a lot of about 100 HP 18" laptops- if HP would give me a good deal on them. (right now, i can buy one for about $900-1000). but if i could offer up my 100 laptops in an auction where you bid in a penny system similar to swoopo's, but where the there is a fixed ending, similar to ebay. i would want to gain a nice return, but also be able to offer a quality product to others at a really good price.
why can't that just be done? let's say i want to make enough profit to: cover the expenses of running this, plus income so that this could replace my 9 to 5 job. we would all gain - not become millionaires, but have a decent lifestyle and be able to purchase things affordably.

there is a fundamental flaw in our makeup, that's why...

Woow this service looks pretty cool to me. Mike from http://www.squidoo.com/joebarrypanicawayreview

Great article. Great explanation ("It's a strange combination of eBay, woot, and slot machine").

I don't think it will be made illegal for some time. Although illegal and somewhat immoral (probably as much as running an online casino), I'll give them credit for their creative business model.

I think most people are missing the point about Swoopo employees bidding. If Swoopo would do anything �illegal�, like inhouse bidding to keep the item, it would come out (eventually) and it would cost them sales. Swoopo needs those sales even those that are �too good to be true�. Example: a Nokia 5800 sold for $198.45 in a penny auction. Total cost for Swoopo: Nokia 5800 (with shipping and handling), from Nokia around $400. Total income for Swoopo $198.45 + 19,845 X $0.75 = $15,082.20!!!! With items selling for around half retail price there is always going to be people interested in bidding!
With the Penny Auctions the final sales price is pretty much irrelevant to Swoopo. Take an items that has a $75.= total cost price for Swoopo. To recoup their cost all they need is 100 bids @ $0.75 each, for a total sales price of $1.= (one hundred price increments of one penny each). As long as they advertise and enough people are around so that the bidding cost per participant stay low, I�m sure anything that sells for $75 in a store will get $20 at auction, meaning 2,000 X $0.75 - $75 = $1,425 profit for Swoopo. Great business model!!

To anyone comparing this to a lottery, in any lottery here in the US there are a finite number of possibilities and it is possible play all of them provided you have and are willing to pay enough money. Also, in a lottery, because of the finite number of possibilities, you know what your odds are. With swoopo, unless you know the number of people that are crazy enough to keep bidding even after the price for the item itself has gone over the retail cost of the item, there is no way to know what your odds are. This actually could make swoopo worse than a lottery. A US lottery is like playing roulette; swoopo is more like playing poker in that you never know how many times someone else will be willing to raise except there is no way to call.

Hi.
I have been examining some of the penny auctions sites for the last couple of weeks. And came across quite a different one called biddingmart. They are not launched yet, but what they are offering is quite different then others.
1. When you register now, you will get 10 free bid (they call it pre-launch) offer.
2. They are UK based (not like swoopo)
3. When you win, you get all the bids you used to win that auction back to your account!!! So actually you only pay for the actual auction price.
4. They also state 90% of their products are collectable from London same day the auction is finalised. So, you don't even need to wait for delivery.

Has anyone heard about these people?

Just search "biddingmart" on google.

I came up with an idea frighteningly similar to this 11 years ago and didn't do a thing about it because everyone I consulted said it was unquestionably illegal.

I feel like an idiot. =(

FORGET IT! FORGET IT! FORGET IT! Please nobody else be a dummy and waste your time or money on Swoopo. If you don't have time(if you have any type of a life) to sit in front of your computer ALL DAY and watch a stupid clock tick down just so it can increase again when a bid is made, then FORGET IT! Wish I would have thought of the idea and could have been rackin in the mulla, but it is impractical and a complete waste of time if you have a life.

I saw swoopo and thought it would be nice to emulate. I decided to bid on a phone to get to know the system. All they say is true, I sat at the computer for 6 hours that day and paid �20 over what the item cost to buy in the store.
After having been through the purchase process on the site I think it is a brilliant business idea. As they say, business is business.
Its not nearly as bad as the worlds largest trusted countries using economic hitmen to control small african and south american countries with huge loans that they can never repay, all the while raping them of mineral deposits and peace...

I played http://www.swipo.com and http://www.youbiid.com and http://www.bidoo.us all of them y played like $30 - $40 haven't won anything...

My son spent $15 in the last one bidoo, and he won a PS3. But it toke like 30 days to deliver the product to our house... They gave us a lot of excuses like it's Christmas... it's out of stock... and lot of stuff... so my conclusion:

Hard to win --> But it's possible --> long waiting for your product

I bought into this at the 50 bid level. Should have looked into it more first.

Simple proof this is a scam (as suggested earlier in this thread)

Pull up the US site in one window http://www.swoopo.com

THen pull up th3e UK site in another http://www.swoopo.co.uk

Start comparing items and bidders. They are exact, down to the times of the auctions, bidders names, etc. Sad thing is the fools do not do the currency conversion on a lot of the prices, especially the winning bid amounts. they just change the currency symbol!!

Hmm. It's pretty interesting. Did you win or loose any money?
Andrea from http://www.netvibes.com/averytemplates

@Avery - no so far i have used 10 bids. I figure i will be parting with the rest of them soon. I might try to win something small like some headphones. Not buying any more though.

There doesn't seem to be any way to prove that the owners of the site themselves are not bidding on items, which would cost them nothing and drastically inflate the bid total.
http://catalogzemli.ru

If it's correct that they don't do currency conversion then the bidders bidding is less valuable dollars will obviously prevent bidders paying much more from winning or the auction stopping when it should.

If this fact is true.......

a charge for a bid against a price that is lower then your prior bid is obviously fraudulent.

criminally so.

the contract is that they charge you to bid again if someone offers to pay MORE then you have paid. More in actual value.

They do have a strange cryptic disclaimer that didn't even hint that this might be what they are disclaiming. Could it be?

It isn't an auction when you don't have control over how much you bid. Most people who sigin up and even by 'bids' won't realise they can't move the price up. Also there limit of how many items you can buy suggests the way to put them out of business is to find out if that's a scam as well- if it's really possible to defeat the house by monitory for transitions from whatever delay the autobids have to manual bidding when the price is low.

THe brand substitution right though creates a spread that can absord any likely optimisation. There is no refund of bidding costs. Even if they did refund bidding costs (it's better to come in second place then to win!) you have still cost others by bidding.

THe reason you can't bid on future auctions is because then teh starting price would have to be the second highest autobidder. Apparently at least case law prevents them from a farcical escalation by the incriment. IT's still not clear thogh what happens when multiple bid buttlers are competing.

Google of course put an add on my gmail reader for this so they are profitting from it.

Isnt' that a violation of there do no evil policy?

Did everyone catch the job descriptions?
The millions in venture funds? If they don't have upfront costs what are they spending the money on? Is it the venture funds that are getting scammed the most?

How are they preventing multiple registrations if the new user auction has any value at all?

FINALLY DON'T BID OVER THERE UNTIL YOU HAVE AT LEAST READ ALL THE COMMENTS HERE AND ELSEWHERE!

once again don't pay them, we don't need any more research....

The question is where is the endgame in this? It's obvious the business model contemplates that. I proposed the venture funds not spent could be subject to looting. Are the funds for stock?

One comment here suggests that you use the autobidder accidentally when you place a bid that requires many bids to get the price bid.

If plastic charges back the last 90 days the company could go insolvent at any time!

The last infusion of cash is from an early venture outfit but this is 3 plus years in....

Also some reports only mention a penny cost to bid...

An important factor is the percentage of customers who are unhappy. A more important fact is the percentage of customers who have in fact been defrauded even if they don't know it.

Bidding against multiple robots seems to be such a way to be a victim.

HOw do they decide who wins when multiple autobids all have the same max? Does that get addressed by there own robot casting teh winning bid?

There are laws against the auctioneer hiring people to bid up the price right?

So again when you bid on this site you are possibly raising the price and taknig money from innocent unknowing people. The price paid is a good deal only if it's low enough to prevent them from making an unfair amount of profit.

It's so funny I'm procrastinating of course in the saem way I did years ago, many, over a rebate site. It was obviously a ponzi scheme. But it went on for many months if not years before filing for bankruptcy.

I feel unlucky to suffer this distraction at this time because google was willing to take there money.

Has a complaint been made to google?

Where is the definitive treatment about the business model? Why is the most recent venture firm so suspicious in there site but searchin gon them finds nothing reported?

I agree it's not a lottery but lotteries allow multiple purchases of the winning number of course.

THey entered USA before the election. Mistake? OF course not.

This venture can increase awareness of fraud but also increase cynicism. It can create good law but also bad. Those of you who have ALREADY been given access to info only paying 'customers' get, who copied everything, should share the terms etc. more widely. Paste them here. BUT PLEASE DON'T SPEND ANYTHING AFTER READING THIS TO OBTAIN SUCH INFO. I mean that. Your pennies are too precious to waste. If you think you can afford to still donat money to a worthier cause after spending them,and the time, you are wrong.

THis also reminds me of Mcgraw Hill citing Nakednews in there online curriculumn.

My suggestion is for nonprofit to conduct this entertainment shopping with all proceeds to worthy causes? Can we get some fundraisers to push this? Is it less enjoyable to waste money on good causes then greed?

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_scheme">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_scheme</a>

Well wiki is failing to keep the link to the site mentioned here off consistently in fact it's the only site linked right now.

BUt I was right about charities. Except I suggested A charity do it for them ALONE. NOt some portion of profits, but ALL!

An important point not yet seen mentione dby others lol.

THE DATABASE OF PROFITABLE CUSTOMERS IS PERHAPS MORE VALUABLE THEN THE TAKE ON AVERAGE FROM THESE 'PEOPLE'.

I'm sure payday lenders etc. are paying a superpremium.

Even political campains.

Also no one else has mentioend there right to only show auctions they choose to custoemrs who visit. I'm assuming this is widely known as an option by the perps. SOrry if I gave someone the idea!

Credit card companies of course have free access to the people who spend on this site. I'm sure they target them for various schemes themselves which explains perhaps why they are allownig there cards to be used!

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swoopo&oldid=288588181">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swoopo&oldid=288588181</a>

incorporates my emphasis of how you can not bid your ultimate price for a known price. This wording actually further emphasises that and the artice already cites this website so to continue to clarify the issue, again building on the comment above about only 'bidding' 3 times but being charged hundreds of dollars, a single 'reserve' type bid will apparently trigger the surpise much higher then advertised fee.

THe business model is totally dependent on people not being able to bid the price they are willing to pay. Where else has this aspect been emphasized? I realisie that everyone accepts it as the premisei once they learn of it. But we should not.

Only surverys of customers will reveal what they actually understand when they first spend. It is that moment that is all important.

Wicki is very strange on consumer protection.

FOre example I don't understand how I got to this page
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_or_Deceptive_Acts_or_Practices">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_or_Deceptive_Acts_or_Practices</a>

as there is no trace of what once was there (they have that power) but the citing site I can search on and find perhaps it must be on wicki itself.

The discussion is good though at there site and I'm sure my comments are already nearly if not reverted. (one reason I continue them here and include a link to what will soon not be the current page incorporting them there).

The link just posted was found easally and it's about creating such a page. Why the back button isn't available in browser just because you opened it in a new tab/page is beyond me.

As far as transparency goes despite the companies claimes when you push BID it does not tell you what your bid is going to be! you have to read the fine print AND do the addition! I'm not being sarcastic.

This screen I'm looking at is just an example and may differ from the actual. At some point you learn how to bid and let it bid for you but I've wagered that's equally poorly explained.

I believe a site that optomises exploitation by allowing relatively samaritan bidders to bid when the price is close to final would take the fun out of bidding for those not bidding with taknig the fun out of bidding in mind. It woul dhave to recruit people given tghere policy about not dominating the action.

SO it's up to us! Impliment a "auctions ending soon" (already in overtime) search engine for such sites. COmpliment it by sorting the results appropriately.

Without such a site casual visitor's can't afford the time to navigage across teh hundreds of auctions now occuring to find those getting ripe at others expense....

I've used Swoopo in the past but there are so many using it now it is SO hard to win, bidding against people from other countries as well. I found another one that is launching soon called doobids. I'd be surprised if anyone knows about it because I have not seen them advertising anywhere yet. They are getting around Facebook as a fan page but they seem a bit different from the others though because they have put extra features on it making the whole process of bidding slightly more transparent, doesn't look as much like a scam! Theres a security certificate as well which is really important for secure transactions. UK company registered and VAT registered. Might be worth a punt for those that care.

only the lucky guys and swoopoo get benifited by that website.........

This is an awesome business model, can I invest?

interesting

the magazine contest that someone was describing earlier is from Scientific American, there were so many entries that they ended up not having to give away any money whatsoever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonia_dilemma

On the topic of swoopo, I'm researching the site for a term paper right now, and trying, to great failure to collect full bid histories for items. Anyone have any bright ideas? I've attempted scraping the html page that each auction page calls to dynamically fill the history table, unfortunately this is terribly inefficient and requires scraping on a fairly small interval.

Any ideas?

Swooperator is launching soon!

Forget about all those ebooks that you have to pay good money for - there are ways and means of winning BIG on Swoopo. Why do you think some people are winning all the time?

The Swooperator will unlock the secrets of swoopo.

Register for FREE at www.swooperator.com and get an invite to our exclusive pre-launch event.

The Swooperator.com team.

Although for the keen eyed, the site seems pure evil in a way, however, the site is not really forcing you to play its game/service/auction. They are not really giving anyone a guaranty to win an auction although, people are guaranteed to have a good time of some sort (depending on the type of person of course). For sure many will lose money however, they can always decide to stop. From a business point of view, I personally believe the concept is ingenious although.

LOL-better than Viagra. Sialis. Levitra. Buy http://www.onlineclinic.biz/

I got ripped off by these fraudsters, I can prove it because I looked at the history and found that the bid ending time was earlier than my first bid, every time. Times were both PDT. I copied the entire page with each bid listed and the time, and pasted it into a Word document and saved it as a doc and htm. I think that is called illegal.

Check out this blog.

http://swoopoisfraud.wordpress.com

See the details on how I found out that swoopo is a ripoff fraudulent website.

http://swoopoisfraud.wordpress.com

I have copied one of the bid items from my history here so that you can see for yourself.

http://swoopoisfraud.wordpress.com

300 Bids Voucher
04-27-2009
13:00 PDT Ended -28

04-27-2009 15:23 PDT:28 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 15:23 PDT:27 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 15:10 PDT:29 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 15:10 PDT:28 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:50 PDT:58 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:50 PDT:37 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:50 PDT:17 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:49 PDT:32 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:49 PDT:17 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:49 PDT:06 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:48 PDT:47 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:48 PDT:46 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:48 PDT:27 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:47 PDT:21 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:41 PDT:41 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:41 PDT:22 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:41 PDT:11 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:40 PDT:52 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:37 PDT:04 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:27 PDT:34 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:27 PDT:16 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:27 PDT:11 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:27 PDT:01 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:26 PDT:15 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:24 PDT:57 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 14:00 PDT:48 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 13:59 PDT:45 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 13:59 PDT:44 Single bid -1

Time ended is 13:00 PDT My first bid was at 13:59 PDT

No wonder I didn't win anything.

Here is another one, a day later. The auction on this item ended the day before. This is sick.

Acer AS8730-6918 18.4-Inch Laptop
04-26-2009
19:30 PDT Ended -100 This number (100) is how many bids
I used on this item. 15cents@bid

04-27-2009 11:59 PDT:27 Back booking 3
04-27-2009 11:59 PDT:27 Back booking 2
04-27-2009 11:57 PDT:18 BidButler -2
04-27-2009 11:55 PDT:31 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:54 PDT:51 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:54 PDT:26 BidButler -3
04-27-2009 11:53 PDT:31 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:53 PDT:21 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:53 PDT:09 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:53 PDT:04 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:52 PDT:59 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:52 PDT:54 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:52 PDT:52 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:52 PDT:50 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:52 PDT:47 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:47 PDT:43 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:47 PDT:40 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:47 PDT:39 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:43 PDT:21 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:43 PDT:18 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:43 PDT:11 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:43 PDT:01 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:42 PDT:59 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:40 PDT:17 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:38 PDT:26 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:38 PDT:22 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:37 PDT:38 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:37 PDT:37 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:37 PDT:21 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:22 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:21 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:18 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:13 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:10 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:06 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:04 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:36 PDT:00 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:35 PDT:56 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:35 PDT:49 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:35 PDT:46 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:35 PDT:19 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:35 PDT:10 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:34 PDT:56 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:34 PDT:55 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:34 PDT:53 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:34 PDT:42 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:33 PDT:12 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:33 PDT:11 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:33 PDT:00 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:21 PDT:41 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:46 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:40 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:35 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:30 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:27 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:23 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:18 PDT:14 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:15 PDT:39 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:15 PDT:35 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:15 PDT:23 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:15 PDT:18 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:15 PDT:12 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:15 PDT:04 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:57 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:55 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:52 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:49 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:45 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:42 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:13 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:14 PDT:04 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:56 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:50 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:43 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:40 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:36 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:25 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:23 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:13 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:13 PDT:03 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:11 PDT:58 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:11 PDT:50 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:11 PDT:40 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:11 PDT:38 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:11 PDT:37 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:10 PDT:21 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:10 PDT:16 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:09 PDT:35 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:09 PDT:26 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 11:09 PDT:23 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:33 PDT:22 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:33 PDT:20 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:33 PDT:19 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:32 PDT:45 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:32 PDT:43 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:32 PDT:40 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:27 PDT:57 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:27 PDT:15 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:26 PDT:44 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:26 PDT:37 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:26 PDT:34 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:26 PDT:32 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 09:26 PDT:28 Single bid -1
04-27-2009 08:56 PDT:44 Single bid -1

Here it is the next day and although it ended already, I'm bidding on it because it was NOT CLOSED ACCORDING TO THE WEBSITE. What the heck is this crap?

The above post is in reference to SWOOPO
www.spoopo.com STOP DON'T CLICK, RIPOFF SITE....

Don't go there, it's fraud!!!!

See my postings above and my blog.

http://swoopoisfraud.wordpress.com

Who was it that said "... it's a wonder a fool and his [ her ] money got together inthe first place"?

Where's a good hacker when you need one?
How about a good old fashioned denial of service attack?
Someone please do something, so many people are losing so much of their hard earned money.

I would disagree on describing these kind of operation as pure evil. Before any person would start to bid on these websites I'm pretty sure they are all well aware of how these things go. You just really have to rely on pure luck to win items without losing that much money. But then again we all have our opinions about this matter. :D

, I'm researching the site for a term paper right now, and trying, to great failure to collect full bid histories for items. Anyone have any bright ideas? I've attempted scraping the html page that each auction page calls to dynamically fill the history table, unfortunately this is terribly inefficient and requires scraping on a fairly small interval

Thanks for this site. I've been seeing this advertised on MANY sites I've visited, and, since my mamma didn't raise no dummy, have never gone to the Swoopo site. I was pretty sure that it would be a scam, there's NO WAY people were scoring, say a $2,000 laptop for $28. Still, my interest was piqued since these ads appear as part of the Google adsense stuff lots of times. I really thought Google might vet their advertisers, but apparently not. Anyway, I decided to research Swoopo before going to the site, and this was the first site that came up in my search. After reading a lot of the comments left here, I'm satisfied that I will NEVER as much as LOOK at one of their 'auctions'. Yes, it's sad that there are so many suckers born every day, but it's also sad that they won't take a few minutes to check things out before they're suckered. I don't do ANYTHING anymore without checking it out first. If I see something advertised on TV, I Google it. If I see a product advertised in a magazine, I Google it. A website I'm not sure of? Yep. I Google it first. It is SO EASY these days to protect oneself, that I don't understand how people can NOT do this. Of course, there are STILL people falling for the Nigerian schemes, this despite all the publicity about those scams. Some people simply refuse to protect themselves, and there's really nothing anyone can do to help them. Making something 'illegal' doesn't help. Nigerian scams are 'illegal'. The people who are after our money will stop at nothing. It's up to each of us as individuals to protect ourselves. That's the sad truth. I wish we COULD force people to be smarter, but....

Anyway, thanks for the info. I appreciate it.

this model sounds as long term?

Illegal? Maybe. Evil? Brilliantly so.

Came across swoopo thought I would get into it; but thought first to check to see what people are saying about it. After reading this blog a no brainer stay away.

dpcax.

Swoopo reminds me alot of one of those toy games where you roll a quarter down a slide into a glass box hoping to get your coin to land behind a stack of other peoples quarters who had tried ahead of you. Then waiting anxiously for the little mechanical bulldozer to push all the other peoples quarters down the shootto win your prize. If you are lucky enough to get your quarter to land just right and the bulldozer does push a bunch of quarters down the shoot; the machine starts to spit out little tickets for you to go and redeem at the local vender in the establishment. With your 150 tickets that you got instead of the money that went down the shoot which they still keep. Those 150 tickets will allow you to buy a pink teddy bear made in china with toxic waste material inside; or a bunch of little nick nacks that you would usually throw away right after youve gotten them.

It's Just like rolling the dice.

dpcax.

I think the business model is ingenious. However, I would not participate for a good number of reasons.

Being that the Business itself is making money off the bids, I would feel there would be less likelihood for any internal monitoring system from preventing a self-outbidding scheme from taking place.

Lets look at it this way.

Swoopo puts up a hot item... lets say a 50" Plasma TV. Bidding opens up at $1.00 with a half hour bidding time.

It gets a few bids and by the time it reaches a 5-Minute marker it is still priced rather low at lets say $27.00.

Now is where the "Fun" begins. With time breaking 5-Minute marker, the bidders watching the auctions are getting more tempted to closely watch the item to try to "pick" their moment, hoping no one else is going to bid.

By the time it breaks 1 Minute remainder time on auction, the 50" Plasma is up to $50.00. If it was a $0.01 auction item, each bid was increasing the auction price by $0.01 / increasing seconds on item by 1-4 seconds (from what I witness watching an auction today). Each bid transaction comes at a cost of $0.60. For the item to have reached a price of $50.00, there would have been4,900 bids @ $0.60 a bid for a total item sale value of $2,940.00 for that 50" Plasma. ($49.00 / $0.01 x $0.60 = $2,940.00) I doubt they paid retail value for that 50" Plasma, so the percentage of Markup on the item sold even at $50.00 would be well over 100%.

That's just the icing on the cake.

Now lets say Joe Blow was banking on getting himself a cheap Plasma and this looked like too sweet a deal to pass up. Joes been bidding since the minute marker and made a grand total of 30 bids (30 bids @ $0.60 = $18.00). Lets be honest, $18.00 isn't that much money really, but if Joe doesn't win the bid, he spent $18.00 on absolutely nothing. Compound that by the thousands and you really got a huge rip off scheme going.

And I am hardly finished. What Joe Blow doesn't realize, along with the hundreds of other participating bidders, is that Swoopo stacked the decks! They've got auto-auction bidders who will continually outbid you on every item till the final tick of the clock. “10 seconds, 8 seconds, 5 second! What, Outbid by JohnnySpot2 yet again!!!... I’ll win this TV YET!”

As I said earlier, who is monitoring these auctions to ensure that this is not happening and how is someone to know they auctions are legit? Who is to say that Swoopo hasn't set into place an auto-bidding program behind their website for every available auction, or that they aren't hiring people on the side to bid on the items themselves, and paying them a percentage of the bottom line $$$ markups they are making off of items. Who is tracking the items sold to ensure there are actually items being delivered to "customers" as you might think of them.

I highly doubt there is any monitoring of a site in this nature, and I am willing to bet that there is a indecipherable user agreement the length of a full series of encyclopedias covering Swoopo's A$$ for the legality of the business they are conducting.

If that penny auction 50" Plasma went up to $200.00 on the final sale, Swoopo brought in an astronomical $11,940.00 for a set that would have retailed $1000.00 - $2000.00 in stores today.

If Swoopo is engaging in self bidding on auctions, and they do not actually let a real bidder/customer win an auction, that $11,940.00 would be ALL PROFIT, since in fact no item was sold or delivered to a "customer"/bidder. I don't care how they may be doing it, but I would be very skeptical on the ethics of this business and would lean towards the angle that this may in fact be the very thing they are doing.

Someone ought to have the business investigated for fraud.

Good deal or not for an individual purchase, this is capitalistic mentality at it's dirtiest.

Hey... SWOOPO... CUT ME IN!!! I'll bid on your auctions for you all day for a measly 1% of your profits from the auctions I partake in, and laugh my A$$ off all the way to the bank just like you are doing.

I think the business model is ingenious. However, I would not participate for a good number of reasons.

Being that the Business itself is making money off the bids, I would feel there would be less likelihood for any internal monitoring system from preventing a self-outbidding scheme from taking place.

Lets look at it this way.

Swoopo puts up a hot item... lets say a 50" Plasma TV. Bidding opens up at $1.00 with a half hour bidding time.

It gets a few bids and by the time it reaches a 5-Minute marker it is still priced rather low at lets say $27.00.

Now is where the "Fun" begins. With time breaking 5-Minute marker, the bidders watching the auctions are getting more tempted to closely watch the item to try to "pick" their moment, hoping no one else is going to bid.

By the time it breaks 1 Minute remainder time on auction, the 50" Plasma is up to $50.00. If it was a $0.01 auction item, each bid was increasing the auction price by $0.01 / increasing seconds on item by 1-4 seconds (from what I witness watching an auction today). Each bid transaction comes at a cost of $0.60. For the item to have reached a price of $50.00, there would have been4,900 bids @ $0.60 a bid for a total item sale value of $2,940.00 for that 50" Plasma. ($49.00 / $0.01 x $0.60 = $2,940.00) I doubt they paid retail value for that 50" Plasma, so the percentage of Markup on the item sold even at $50.00 would be well over 100%.

That's just the icing on the cake.

Now lets say Joe Blow was banking on getting himself a cheap Plasma and this looked like too sweet a deal to pass up. Joes been bidding since the minute marker and made a grand total of 30 bids (30 bids @ $0.60 = $18.00). Lets be honest, $18.00 isn't that much money really, but if Joe doesn't win the bid, he spent $18.00 on absolutely nothing. Compound that by the thousands and you really got a huge rip off scheme going.

And I am hardly finished. What Joe Blow doesn't realize, along with the hundreds of other participating bidders, is that Swoopo stacked the decks! They've got auto-auction bidders who will continually outbid you on every item till the final tick of the clock. “10 seconds, 8 seconds, 5 second! What, Outbid by JohnnySpot2 yet again!!!... I’ll win this TV YET!”

As I said earlier, who is monitoring these auctions to ensure that this is not happening and how is someone to know they auctions are legit? Who is to say that Swoopo hasn't set into place an auto-bidding program behind their website for every available auction, or that they aren't hiring people on the side to bid on the items themselves, and paying them a percentage of the bottom line $$$ markups they are making off of items. Who is tracking the items sold to ensure there are actually items being delivered to "customers" as you might think of them.

I highly doubt there is any monitoring of a site in this nature, and I am willing to bet that there is a indecipherable user agreement the length of a full series of encyclopedias covering Swoopo's A$$ for the legality of the business they are conducting.

If that penny auction 50" Plasma went up to $200.00 on the final sale, Swoopo brought in an astronomical $11,940.00 for a set that would have retailed $1000.00 - $2000.00 in stores today.

If Swoopo is engaging in self bidding on auctions, and they do not actually let a real bidder/customer win an auction, that $11,940.00 would be ALL PROFIT, since in fact no item was sold or delivered to a "customer"/bidder. I don't care how they may be doing it, but I would be very skeptical on the ethics of this business and would lean towards the angle that this may in fact be the very thing they are doing.

Someone ought to have the business investigated for fraud.

Good deal or not for an individual purchase, this is capitalistic mentality at it's dirtiest.

Hey... SWOOPO... CUT ME IN!!! I'll bid on your auctions for you all day for a measly 1% of your profits from the auctions I partake in, and laugh my A$$ off all the way to the bank just like you are doing.

I think the business model is ingenious. However, I would not participate for a good number of reasons.

Being that the Business itself is making money off the bids, I would feel there would be less likelihood for any internal monitoring system from preventing a self-outbidding scheme from taking place.

Lets look at it this way.

Swoopo puts up a hot item... lets say a 50" Plasma TV. Bidding opens up at $1.00 with a half hour bidding time.

It gets a few bids and by the time it reaches a 5-Minute marker it is still priced rather low at lets say $27.00.

Now is where the "Fun" begins. With time breaking 5-Minute marker, the bidders watching the auctions are getting more tempted to closely watch the item to try to "pick" their moment, hoping no one else is going to bid.

By the time it breaks 1 Minute remainder time on auction, the 50" Plasma is up to $50.00. If it was a $0.01 auction item, each bid was increasing the auction price by $0.01 / increasing seconds on item by 1-4 seconds (from what I witness watching an auction today). Each bid transaction comes at a cost of $0.60. For the item to have reached a price of $50.00, there would have been4,900 bids @ $0.60 a bid for a total item sale value of $2,940.00 for that 50" Plasma. ($49.00 / $0.01 x $0.60 = $2,940.00) I doubt they paid retail value for that 50" Plasma, so the percentage of Markup on the item sold even at $50.00 would be well over 100%.

That's just the icing on the cake.

Now lets say Joe Blow was banking on getting himself a cheap Plasma and this looked like too sweet a deal to pass up. Joes been bidding since the minute marker and made a grand total of 30 bids (30 bids @ $0.60 = $18.00). Lets be honest, $18.00 isn't that much money really, but if Joe doesn't win the bid, he spent $18.00 on absolutely nothing. Compound that by the thousands and you really got a huge rip off scheme going.

And I am hardly finished. What Joe Blow doesn't realize, along with the hundreds of other participating bidders, is that Swoopo stacked the decks! They've got auto-auction bidders who will continually outbid you on every item till the final tick of the clock. “10 seconds, 8 seconds, 5 second! What, Outbid by JohnnySpot2 yet again!!!... I’ll win this TV YET!”

As I said earlier, who is monitoring these auctions to ensure that this is not happening and how is someone to know they auctions are legit? Who is to say that Swoopo hasn't set into place an auto-bidding program behind their website for every available auction, or that they aren't hiring people on the side to bid on the items themselves, and paying them a percentage of the bottom line $$$ markups they are making off of items. Who is tracking the items sold to ensure there are actually items being delivered to "customers" as you might think of them.

I highly doubt there is any monitoring of a site in this nature, and I am willing to bet that there is a indecipherable user agreement the length of a full series of encyclopedias covering Swoopo's A$$ for the legality of the business they are conducting.

If that penny auction 50" Plasma went up to $200.00 on the final sale, Swoopo brought in an astronomical $11,940.00 for a set that would have retailed $1000.00 - $2000.00 in stores today.

If Swoopo is engaging in self bidding on auctions, and they do not actually let a real bidder/customer win an auction, that $11,940.00 would be ALL PROFIT, since in fact no item was sold or delivered to a "customer"/bidder. I don't care how they may be doing it, but I would be very skeptical on the ethics of this business and would lean towards the angle that this may in fact be the very thing they are doing.

Someone ought to have the business investigated for fraud.

Good deal or not for an individual purchase, this is capitalistic mentality at it's dirtiest.

Hey... SWOOPO... CUT ME IN!!! I'll bid on your auctions for you all day for a measly 1% of your profits from the auctions I partake in, and laugh my A$$ off all the way to the bank just like you are doing.