BIDDER: Mnemosyne

UK

http://www.tele...orts/95645.html

http://www.tele...ack-/85106.html

SPAIN

http://www.tele...egro/85106.html

http://www.tele...sl56/80923.html

GERMAN

http://www.tele...ein-/87687.html

The same bidder won auctions in multiple different countries.

Ebay charges the sellers money for selling thier items, this place charges the bidders for bidding.

You put in 10 bids (which cause you to win) a 1000 dollar tv. You just have to pay $200 for it. Your cost? $210. Now sure, you can bid 100 times, or more, depending on how much you want something. And it will end up costing you $300. Still a steal for a $1000 tv.

Its all about who wants it more. The more you bid, the more chances you have to get it.

Its not gambling, its the equivilant of a Raffle. Except you have more control over it.

its perfectly legal, not a scam. Everyone has a chance of winning, just depends on when you want to quit.

I agree with using an independent auditing company, however, it needs to have a reputable name – and, it is still no guarantee that it will prevent a criminal or civil suit for conducting a lottery game. I’m not accusing Swoopo of being a lottery but it is very, very ‘close to the line’.

Brian

product retail end price # of bids end price profit
wii 250 166.5 1110 166.5 1026.5
ps3 400 277.5 1850 277.5 1727.5
wii game 20 6.45 43 6.45 29.45
acer note 400 292.65 1951 292.65 1843.65
sony lapt 1300 177.47 17747 177.47 16624.47
ds lite 130 34.65 231 34.65 135.65
8G ipod 229 37.05 247 1 19
$1000 1000 723.6 4824 0 3824
nokia n95 750 40.65 271 40.65 -438.35
4 gb flash 38 2.55 17 2.55 -18.45
50 bids 0 2.85 19 0 19
waffle mkr 60 0.9 6 0.9 -53.1
crdlss phn 100 44.25 295 44.25 239.25
37″ hdtv 1200 136.95 913 69 -218
wii kart 50 1.5 10 1.5 -38.5
ds lite 130 65.7 438 65.7 373.7
50 bids 0 100.65 671 0 671
rebel cam 899 858 5720 79 4900
ps 3 game 60 26.85 179 26.85 145.85
TOTAL PROFIT 30812.62
Not bad for 2 hours of not really working.
I bought a 20 pack but realized there was no way I was going to win. I requested a refund of my pack but still haven’t heard a response.

It took the AG’s office in the states of both companies a very long time to act upon complaints of illegal gaming / chance before the sites closed.

It was a very profitable run for the site owners, but eventually they were pressured to cease and desist their operations. I do not know the legal or criminal result of the attorney general’s intervention, however.

Despite claims by the site owners that it was ‘chance’, the complaints to the AG’s office pointed out specifics that presumably pushed it over to the ‘gambling’ / ‘lottery’ classification instead. My research found that such laws/rules are more flexible in other countries, such as UK.

I suspect the same investigation will happen to Swoopo, however, because it operates outside of the United States, I’m not sure what the jurisdiction effects will be. Likely, it will be a C&D to market to North American audiences.

Also, even a U.S. patent will not stop civil and criminal lawsuits within North America.

My 3 cents…

On a side note… Good luck to you, Gunnar. I’m hopeful that Swoopo will fine the right balance between ‘too good to be true’ and legal.

Brian

PS. If you need new sources of merchandise, consider the line of Money Handling Electronics at http://www.Bett...Electronics.com

CEO Gunnar lives in Germany, that’s how he gets around U.S. State and Federal laws. The site it hosted out of Germany. It’s still a scam to me. What can happen and probably will, is the government will have the site shut down permanently. Even though they say the lose money on 70% of the good and make profit on 30%, I honestly don’t believe that.

I’ve been watching their auctions all day and I saw a $229.00 IPod sell for $66.75 which cost bidders $445. So Swoopo made $511.75 – $229.00 = $282.75 off the Ipod. That’s almost double what the product costed. How many did the people who didn’t win lose? A lot. With EBay there is ONE clear winner and no real losers. If you lose on EBay, you just go to the next auction. You don’t have to worry about losing $20-$500 and seeing nothing in return. Good luck to the people who use this website. Supposely they have about 50,000 members. I registered and went to make a bid and found out you had to “Pay For Bids” and I said, “No way!!”. What a joke.

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

Your article has a couple of incorrect assumptions and conclusions.

Say I spend $500 in bids and at the last minute I’m sniped by a final bidder.

Like a real auction, bidding will continue until there are no more bids. When someone places a bid, the time is extended to allow for all interested bidders to get in their bids. Imagine an auctioneer standing in the front of a room, saying, “going once, going twice,..” If anyone bids, at this point, the auctioneer will extend the time for bidding to all of the bidders. So, you cannot be sniped.

There are also “BidButlers” who can watch the bidding for you and bid automatically, further confusing the invisible hand of the market.

Auctions for high value items can be live for a longer period of time. We have hence developed a bidding agent called “BidButler” that places bids on our users’ behalf when they cannot be online. Additionally, we are showing the bidding history of the last 10 bids clearly indicating if the bids were placed by the BidButler or not (shown on site as SingleBid).

Presumably that lost $500 goes towards buying more product for the site and increasing Swoopo’s revenue.

Any of the money received from bids will first go towards paying for the product that is being auctioned. If there is a surplus of money from one auction, the remainder will be put toward any auctions where Swoopo does not cover the costs of the products in an auction. The latter group making up about 70% of all auctions.

And, as a note, all of our auctions are for brand new, factory sealed, factory warranted items. We are currently shipping items totaling about $1.5 million to our winners every month. Needless to say that all bids are placed by real users. Swoopo cannot influence any auction after it has begun.

I think that Spreadbid is slightly better in terms of layout etc!

But the users can’t – Swoopo doesn’t provide a way for them to collaborate (of course). Instead they act against their collective best interests with occasionally awe-inspiring stupidity. E.g. This Wii system (http://www.swoo...rts/103441.html ) sold for $285.60 – $36.60 MORE than it was worth. I nice little profit for Swoopo, right? But wait… they also collected $1 from each person who bid on the item (winnner and losers alike) for every $0.15 of that final price, for a staggering additional profit of $1,904!

Vegas can only dream of raking in that kind of return from gamblers.

This site isn’t just a hint of scammy…it’s fraudulent.

Personally I think Telebid/Swoopo is too addictive and too misleading but it does seem to have had a fair share of success making many times the cost of the prizes and even making fortunes on auctioning their own free-bid vouchers (why anyone would personally pay more money than a voucher’s ‘worth’ is beyond me and highlights how dangerously addictive this is)!!

In a pre-emptive pot, kettle, black, strike I’d like to clarify Raffle.it. Raffle.it is also based on a game of skill and does have one winner for each raffle, I guess we’d call it entertainment shopping too. BUT we stipulate from the start exactly how many tickets are available, at what price, and ensure that there is some form of reward that if used, is worth more than a raffle’s ticket cost for everyone that takes part. Raffle.it is on course to be a fully blown marketplace supporting people struggling to sell their stuff, schools crying out for additional equipment, charities and businesses.