Swoopo Review, best deal ever or another scam?

Swoopo ads has been pouring all over Gossip Gamers through Googles ad program and I couldn’t help notice how convincing some of their offers were. PS3 for $42.60 sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me but how would that be possible? The trick is, Swoopo charges those who bid — a whole 75 cents each.

Three fourths of a dollar may seem like a paltry sum to get a $1,300 piece of hardware for a portion of the price, but those 75 cents add up rather quickly. Bidding on a single item fifteen times costs the bidder a total of $11.25. And from then on it just snowballs into larger and larger amounts.

The site does let you know very clearly that bidding incurs this charge. Each auction page tells the bidder the 75 cent surcharge, the amount each bid raises the price, as well as the time the auction has left.

It seems squeaky clean at first glance — the 75 cent charge isn’t even that bad — but the bid increments, time system, and even the “BidButler” program that automatically bids are all set up in a way that the site makes a huge amount of profit on those who do not win the auctions.

The majority of bidding increments are 15 cents, though some “specials” are penny auctions which go up extremely slowly. But the point of only allowing users to bid 15 cents or a penny at a time is to rake in as many bets as possible.

Of course anyone is willing to pay $42.60 dollars for a Playstation 3 but the auctions start at tiny sums to get more bids in. Working up from $5 or $15 all the way up to just $150 takes over a hundred bets, each one of each costing the bidders 75 cents.

Also, many bids actually raise the auction time up to a maximum of 20 seconds each. More times than not, when a bid reaches down to the first ten seconds anyone looking to get the item bids and the time frame jumps back up in accordance to demand. Anyone not using the “BidButler” program might as well not bid with this type of system.

BidButler only bids up the maximum amount of times and amount the user sets, but if a maximum bid ratio is not set it will bid each time it is upped until it reaches the maximum. And those using the program all jump in within the last seconds of the auction, forcing the time up from seconds to minutes.

Let’s say the auction for the PS3 started at 1 cent, using the penny auction system, it would require 4,260 bids to end the auction at $42.60. Again, Swoop charges $.75 each bid — 4,260 X $.75 leading Swoopo to have already earned $3,195 from the community of bidders for the sale of the PS3. That’s the biggest profit anyone can make off a sale on a PS3.

To that one lucky winner however, $42.60 is a huge bargain, but your odds are unlikely unless you’ve bidded an insane amount of times. The retail cost of a PS3 is $399.99, allowing you to bid about 500 times before, if you can win the auction within 500 bids, you may have broken even.

Swoopo is not a site for the frugal or the inattentive. Those looking for a deal on something extremely expensive can save a bundle of money as long as they set their values right on BidButler, or do it on their own and watch it like a hawk for hours to see when the automatic bidders have given up.

Many users have claimed there are many different strategies that can help you win and gain a profit. Although this may be true, their business model however nothing more than an online casino/lottery masking an an auction site.

Anyone looking to save a few dollars should look elsewhere. Chances are the charges for bidding will accumulate to a price point close to the original value, and that sort of negates the point.

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