Beware of Penny Auction Sites That Cheat Bidders
Penny auction sites are becoming increasingly popular with eBay having lost faith. However, while you may find some genuinely awesome deals on these websites, there are quite a few scam websites on the rise. So, in order to avoid these pitfalls, you must first educate yourself in the art with which penny auction sites work. If you know how a typical or a genuine penny auction site works you may be able to differentiate a cheater from a real bidder.
On a typical penny auction site merchandise is offered for sale at bargain prices. A reliable site with a large number of users may have several auctions going on at one time; a maximum number of eight per hour. A new site may have one auction per hour of every day or if it’s really staggered than it could be just one auction per day. Some reliable websites may also feature one auction per hour just on principal. To bid on penny auction sites, users must buy bids and then try to outbid each other on a certain product being auctioned. On penny auction sites, unlike standard auction sites, the bid only increases the price by a penny. The more people bidding on a product, the more times they bid, the more time there is to bid. The last person to place a bid generally wins the product at a bargain price.
The basic issue at hand for a new penny auction sites is to get users. The more users they have the more products will be auctioned resulting in more money made for them. However, most penny auction sites start off with earning a lot of losses before they gain user attention. What scammers do is that they tend to create fake users on their websites and these fake users place fake bids on their products so that the final bidding price is very high. So, if a real user does buy a bid, he will either not be able to win the bid because of all the fake users or he’ll get the product at an absurdly high price. These scam sites place bids via software called ‘bot’ or through actual employees or friends, which makes these websites entirely useless when trying to win an auction.
Though it may seem impossible to distinguish between a real penny auction site and fraud, we have some pointers to help you recognize a fake. Firstly, you can check if the users who are bidding are all the same, that is, are there the same users bidding all day consistently. Secondly, by Googling a site’s traffic statistics you may also see if it’s fake or not. If it has a lot of bidding going on but the traffic is low then that site is definitely a scam and you better run away fast. Another step to take is to Google a site’s name along with ‘bot’ or ‘cheat.’ Or you can check websites like the Penny Auction Watch where frauds and other penny auction news is published regularly.
