A fool and his money are soon parted. This has the same stench about it as does Quibids. I strongly recommend that no punter touches this.
Let's have a look at the
5 Star auction. The key to the scam is the hard-to-see fine-print statement under the BID button that says :
With each bid, the auction price increases by $0.01
Think about this statement carefully and remember that it costs $2 simply to make a bid (or a little less if you buy bids in bulk). The auction has a reserve price of $20, which is where the auction starts. Let's pretend for the sake of this discussion that the winning bid is $30 and that the lucky punter bids this amount on his 10th bid. That punter's total outlay to win the auction will have been $30 + 10x$2 = $50, so he'll be pretty happy having paid a lot less than the $160 value of the 5 Star voucher.
But what this misses is that because of the 1¢ bidding increments there will have been 1,000 bids to raise the bid price by $10 from $20 to $30. And every one of those bids will have cost the bidders $2 because there are no refunds for losing bidders. That means Bidsmo's take on this auction would be $50 from the winning bidder plus 990x$2 = $1,980 from the losing bidders for a grand total of $2,030 (or a little less if some bidders used bulk-bought bids). So even though the winning bid is $30, the real price that Bidsmo sells the voucher for is not $30 but $2,030. Nice work if you can get it!
Effectively, what Bidsmo is doing is selling as many raffle tickets that they can suck punters into buying at $2.01 each to win a prize valued at $160. Would you go in a raffle if you didn't know how many tickets were being sold?
Avoid this like the plague, fellow punters!!
Originally Posted by Bracket
A fool and his money are soon parted. This has the same stench about it as does Quibids. I strongly recommend that no punter touches this.
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