Good tip! Thanks for putting the time in for that one. Bump

Also, if you watch the countdown timers every time an "auction" is about to end, a bid is placed and more time is added. Sweet scam indeed.

I checked Swoopo out a while ago and quickly realized it was nothing I was interested in. As soon as I read that I'd being paying $1.00 for every bid I placed, I knew I'd never use the site.

I don't really think it's a scam -- it's made pretty clear how the site runs. I just find it astounding that so many people do use it and pay that $1.00 every time they bid.

There's different kinds of scams. Ponzi schemes are easily understood if you take the time to look at them but it's still a scam. It's just the kind of scam that relies on you not thinking too deeply which is why I went ahead and laid out in simple terms why this particular scam is bad.

Is it really so much a scam as more of a lottery type scheme? It seems pretty solid, you pay a dollar to add .15 cents on, hope eventually it stops with you. Kinda like a raffle.

Funny, I knew exactly how the bids worked and I still tried to win a camera. I think the game favors the bidders with automatic bids but it may not be on the up and up. I started a website called www.swoopo-scam.com to help spread the word. Swoopo is trying to "lure" me back now with .75 cent bids. I think it will eventually get the scummy place of honor it deserves.

[7] Awesome.

There's currently an offer for 300 bids, and the auction price is up to over $800! people are paying $800 to get $300? I can't believe anyone is manually bidding that- so I think that is more of the auto-bidding system at work wasting people's bids.

[9] That auction is now up to $1,278.75
They are single bidders (not the automated Bid Butler)

From reading the information on this particular auction - the final winner does not have to pay the final auction price for the card. The card is actually "free".

People are, however, paying 75 cents for each bid they make so therefore, Swoopo is making mucho dinero on the auction!

Since the auction is now at $1,278.75, and has increased in increments of 15 cents for each bid placed, that means there has been a total of 8,525 bids at .75 cents each.

This equals $6,393.75 dollars that Swoopo took in on the auction so far! And it's not over yet!

The card is for 300 "free" bids which is a total of $225.00 if you were to simply buy that many bids. The person who finally wins it will have paid only the total amount they paid for bids made on the auction but we will not know what that amount is until the end of it.

Have these people lost their minds??

Update:

The same auction is still going and is now up to $1,760.40 - that is a total of $8,802.00 going to Swoopo.

I am speechless...

Final Update:

Auction over.
Ending price $1,783.05
11,887 total bids
$8,915.25 earned by Swoopo

Winning bidder placed 1,072 bids totalling $804.00 spent to win a card worth $225.00 actual value (300 bids x 75 cents each)

Swoopo's auction ending gives the name of the winner and says Congratulations to him or her.

Congratulations indeed - you are not the brightest bulb on the tree!

I put 22 bucks in on the site (and never again). I wanted to give it a spin. Soon after my 3rd bid, I figured out what was going on here.

However, I have to side with [6] and [7]. I mean For one person ""playing"" on the website, its a great idea.

Just, Everyone and their brother thinks that they are the one person playing.

I think the site loses a LOT between Theory and Practice.

This is the standard Dollar Auction that psychologists have studied for years.

You can play this at home with your kids...its been done in school classrooms.

Its a very interesting phenomenon.

Usually the format looks like this:

We're bidding on a dollar, make a bid, but all bids are "spent" (even the loser's). So someone bids $.10 and someone else bids $.20 and someone else bids $.30 and so on until the bid gets to around $0.90. That still seems reasonable, right. You bid $.90 to get $1.00, I'd do that all day.

But then the person who is losing with an $0.80 bid realizes that they're out $.80 and are getting nothing. So they bid $1.00 Spending a dollar to get a dollar means they break even, which is better than losing $0.80.

So then the guy who bid $0.90 realizes that losing $0.10 is better than losing $0.90 and so bids $1.10 to win $1.00, and on it goes.

I've seen dollar auction experiments reported where the 1.00 was eventually auctioned off for like $10 because losing $1.00 less kept people bidding.

Do a search on Dollar Auctions its a well documented phenomenon.

Personally, Kudos to Swoopo for capitalizing on it.

[21] - Spam attempt? This guy is brand new to the website and only here to comment on this thread... and in this manner? Looks very suspicious to me. Definitely not going to follow his link!