About a year ago I blogged about Telebid, the on-line bidding site with a difference. The difference is that you need to be a chump to fall for the proposition. I just checked to see if they had been closed down now, but I see they are now called Swoopo. (www.swoopo.co.uk)
It looks like a very cool auction site with some real bargains. There is an upmarket Viaio laptop going for £44.80p What is the catch?
The catch is that it costs money to bid. They state very clearly that bidding starts at 10p and it costs 50p for each bid. And each bid ups the price by 2p or 10p. Do some math. The Sony was a 2p auction, so a price of £44.80 means that there must have been 2240 bids. At 50p per bid that means they have made well over a grand in bidding fees with five minutes to go.
In a bizarre twist, they are auctioning packs of 300 bids (worth £150). One pack was sold for £28.32 on a 2p auction so they have made an amazing £708.
Is this a scam? Not at all. They are not cheating and are very clear about how the site works. You just have to be dumb to fall for it.
This was started by a very clever German guy with presumably no conscience at all. There is an interview with the Manager of Sucker Development – sorry Business development here.
Bob Browning's blog 
If you lose, you can apply all your lost bids towards buying the product. I see this as a no risk proposition. Fun and no risk. Hard to see why it is for suckers. I’m going to try it.
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Do let us know how you get on James..
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I think it’s funny when the most popular auctions on penny auction sites are the ones for bidpacks because when people bid on bidpacks Swoopo or whatever other penny auction site is just printing their own money. You’re right this is a brilliant idea for a company, and many, many people have jumped on the bandwagon here – to the point where there are dozens of penny auction sites. The problem is they aren’t all legitimate and some are cheating their users. I blog about penny auctions at Penny Auction Insider my penny auction blog
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