Swoopo?

Someone at my coin club had brought up this site the other night and it slipped my mind until today. Anyone lose any money bidding or whatever it is on this site? Is it a scam?

http://www.swoopo.com/auction/1-ounce-gold-bar-31-10g-200-free-bids/285168.html

 

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I checked out the site. The URL you provided links to an auction where [supposedly] a 1oz bar of gold sold for $412.49. The auction closed in February of this year... A bit odd, eh?

 

OP was in February.....

 

Yup. I was trying help by perusing through the 'inbox'.

 

Was probably plated tungsten anyway......:smile

 

Even though it's a true auction site where you bid against someone else and it is incremental in cents, they charge you like .35 cents every time you pull the trigger. So, say you bid on something that say retails for $500 but is only at $19.95, you go ahead and bid 10 times and loose, the company still collects $3.50 from you and all the other shmucks who put losing bids in also. The last person to bid wins, they may have spent $250 to win it, but the host company that put the item up for bid makes a killing off
all the losers.

 

Thanks for making me aware of this site and its cheese-weasel way of bilking bidders. I appreciate it.

 

Yeah I read about the scam after I posted my question. Hopefully they're out of business already!

 

I also appreciate the information. Thanks!

 

This site does the same thing. You'll often see items that sell for hundreds have closing bids under $100. As someone pointed out though, each of those one cent bids costs a lot more than that, so an item may appear as though it sold for $20 bucks, but in reality the sum total of the cost of all the bids equals about $2500 because each bid cost .70. To me it's basically gambling.

http://www.bidrivals.com/us/