Yesterday I saw an ad in my Gmail account, about some gadget sold at an incredibly low price on some new auction website. Although the price seemed "too small to be true", and the general advice is not to believe an offer that does not seem credible, I went on to check on the website. Being referred by Google it should be no surprise to anybody that I searched google for this "magnificent" new website called Swoopo. I read some rather beningn articles, and I started to learn about their business model.
My biggest surprises: not only that Swoopo makes $1 for every 15 cents that are bid on an item, but the "winning prices" of the items are nowhere near that low as Swoopo advertises. One of my "favorites" is an auction for a Sony Vaio, that is about to end "in a few seconds".. from yesterday. This is because each bid pushes the auction ending by 15 seconds. The poor suckers keep bidding, paying $1 for each $0.15 increment, and the price of the thing got already to $2,866 as of this writing, although the MSRP is only $1,399. (please click on the picture to see it better for yourself). The "happy winner" is going to pay more than double the price suggested (which is generally high anyway), plus a hefty premium for bidding: what swoopo makes is over 6 times the "winning price" (they make $1 for every$0.15), so on this item alone Swoopo made already a whooping $19,000!!!!.. from auctioning 1 piece of a Sony Vaio notebook, and without selling it yet.
A word of wisdom says that is not stupid the one who asks, but the one who gives. In this case however, I think stupid is all of us if we let this website and this business model function like they want. Authorities, lawyers, please show these "europeans" why America is different! Europeans, please don't take it personally, but this scam functioned and still functions at its leisure in countries like Germany and UK. Although people complain, the website is still on.
