I am going to divulge a lot of information about the inner workings of Swipe Bids through out this entire article. Buyer Beware. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to make an informed decision regarding Swipe Bids as well as any other Penny Auction website.
At the bottom of this article, you will find many user comments about their experiences with Swipe Bids which you will probably find useful. Also feel free to add your own opinion and knowledge of Swipe Bids and Penny Auctions.
Swipe Bids is a penny auction website that promises savings of up to 90% and unbelievable deals on EVERYTHING! And their registration page and home page makes everything look great… You might even say, too good to be true? You might even considering googling “Swipe Bids Scam” or “Swipe Bids Reviews” to see what other people have to say about such fishy (perhaps fraudulent) claims. Also be careful, this same company operates several websites with different names, and there are many other “clone” websites out there that are all the same.
Well Here’s How Swipe Bids Really Works
YOU HAVE TO PAY EACH TIME YOU BID!!!!
And each time you bid, the auction’s timer increases just a little bit, by about 10 seconds. So you’ve gotten your camera bid in, you’re about to win a $1000 camera for $124 and there’s 3 seconds left on the clock, right? Wrong, someone else just bid extending the action another 10 seconds and increasing the price by another PENNY …. and this can go on for HOURS.
Gee, how much do these bids cost? Well this is the thing overlooked by most people when they sign up for Swipe Bids penny auction website. They instantly charge you $150 to your credit card to buy 300 bids. This is only shown on the second registration page, after you have already typed in a bunch of personal information… And they make this a little sketchy because the second page looks almost identical except for where they slip in this wording telling you about the $150 charges to your credit card, Its not like a shopping cart with a checkout. A LOT of people don’t notice this part, nor do they notice where it says “no refunds”.
OK so this far it isn’t technically a scam, its just misleading and a little slimy. However, this is where we expose the SCAM part of the process. Swipe Bids has the power to shill their own auction’s bids. In other words, behind the scenes Swipe Bids may at the last second bid on their own auctions to extend them a little longer to keep things from selling at either
- Too low of a price
- Before enough people have spent enough money on bids for them to make a profit on the auction
You see, that’s how they make money selling things so cheap, the bids cost money therefore subsidizing the cost of the actual item, and with each bid, its like a SWIPE of your credit card… Get It LOL. Any one auction may have hundreds or even thousands of bids by the time the auction is finally won, and those bids are what pay for the auctions item and put money into Swipe Bids fraudulent pockets (OK, so this isn’t technically fraud yet but read on). Take this example… What if an auction is ending too early without enough bids? Swipe Bids can step in and bid themselves to up the anti and force you to spend more bids and extend the auction a little longer… And who is going to be able to stop them or monitor this process? Swipe Bids wont even give away their location if you ask!
Sure there are some winners, some people do in fact win very cheap items… however for every one winner, there are SEVERAL losers. Everyone has to pay for their bids, regardless of whether they win the item or not. And in order for swipe bids to actually turn a profit, the odds need to be stacked highly against you – the bidder; so that you will actually, in the end, not save any money at all… If everyone actually saved money, If EVERYONE actually won things for 90% off, the website would be bankrupt. This is the same way casino’s work, the odds are stacked against the gambler. OK OK, casinos are not a scam, people know how casinos work and the house NEEDS to win a majority of the time, however Swipe Bids has the ability to hide behind the internet and can pull all sorts of nasty tricks on you if they want to.
You see, all auctions on Swipe Bids are started by Swipe Bids themselves. They control everything, and if they plug an auction into a mathematical formula and see that their product’s auction is about to end without turning a profit, their software can easily place it’s own bids to extend the duration and force people to buy more bids for the item. HOW ELSE would they be able to operate with such a low volume of customers? I mean this website is NEW and its not well enough known to have an enormous volume of bidders across their pages of listed items, I mean its got nowhere close to the traffic of Ebay, comparing Swipe Bids to Ebay would be like comparing a SkyScraper to a grain of sand in traffic size…. On top of this, they are unlikely to get a lot of return visitors because each auction needs to have several losers, each of whom can waste in excess of $100 in bids on just one auction.
Fun Facts!
- By the time the auction ended (5 hours later than the first image at the top), the camera in the Swipe Bids auction pictured had had another 13,105 BIDS!!
- At even 10 cents a bid (you can bid on bids and usually win them around this price), people still spent $1,305 on bids alone, and the guy who one had to buy the camera for $256 on top of whatever he spend on bidding.
- Only 1 person won that camera auction, and only after spending several hundreds in bids
- Several people lost this auction and threw their money down the drain and wasted several hours of their lives
- There is no way to know if Swipe Bids extended the auction superficially on their side in order to make more money (is it a coincidence that it ended so abruptly so early (11:00pm), but right after they cleared over $100 in bids (AT LEAST) over the MSRP of the camera?)
So do you still want to try Swipe Bids? What are your thoughts?
” by Clara Shih. I’m just starting it tonight and I plan to get through most, if not all of it during memorial day weekend (this weekend).