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My Theory: Winners24.com Is A Scam
By andrew | November 7, 2008
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...I was told about a site (winners24.com) by a buddy of mine. He heard an advertisement for them on 92.3 KRock.
After toying around with the site for awhile, I have come to the conclusion that it is a scam.
First, let me give you the premise of the site. They sell items, most of them are worth several hundred dollars or more. The price they sell them for starts at $0.00 and has a count down timer (the timer generally starts at 15 or 30 seconds). Once the item becomes “active” you bid for the right to be the one person to buy it. Each bid costs you $1 and raises the price of the item by $0.01. A new bid resets the timer at its original value and it begins to count down again. If you are the last person to bid on the item when the timer reaches zero, you can buy the item at its final price.
On the cover it seems very fun. Many people risking a small amount of money with one of them ultimately getting the prize. The strategy is very straight forward, be willing to spend the most bidding to win.
I believe this site to be a scam for several reasons:
1. I have consistently observed a small core group of users, bidding vigorously on every auction. If there are 4 simultaneous auctions running, they will be sporadically bidding on all 4 of them. With such a short time span to rest within each auction, it’s unreasonable to think that a person can be watching 3-4 simultaneous auctions at the same time. Also, with each bid costing $1, they are spending a tremendous amount of money on novelty items.
2. The aforementioned core group all hail from major US cities. Easy to come up with when you trying to create profile information for random bots that will bid up your items.
3. It is not uncommon to see one of these members bid over 50 times for an item that retails for $25 (these items are bidding credits which we’ll get to later). Most reasonable people will know when to cut their losses and call it quits. The “25 bids” is generally the cheapest item at $25, so this is where the incongruity really stands out. When bidding on a $1600 TV, excessive amounts of bidding can be expected since you will save in the long run.
4. More recently, I have observed a rapid succession of bids within one second. Going from one user to the next then back to the first. Since this is all within one second, I’ll mention that the oldest is at the bottom.
Bidding this fast is impossible
In this example you see that Suzy21 had the last bid in, then Kayla followed her, then Elizabeth bid twice, followed by Lopez19. Within the same second, somehow Suzy21 got wind of this and bid again, only to get beaten by Penelope then Kayla. Suzy21, still within one seconds time, became enraged at this and threw in another bid. We see, though, that Elizabeth had the last laugh. This auction continued on in this manner for several more minutes with masses of bids coming in at the same time. So 12:48:09 was an avalanche of bids, then nothing, then 5-10 seconds later, a second avalanche of bids. It is almost as if all these women are somehow connected… probably running on the same server.
5. The items that are won (usually by one of the core group) usually end up for sale again the next day or the same day. I suppose it is possible that they buy certain items in bulk to save money. I mean, who could possibly pass up a deal on a whole bushel of bright pink iPod nano’s, or a nice stack of MacBook Air laptops? More likely, the items are not going out to anybody and they just keep listing them incase they need to actually ship one out at one point. That or they have zero stock. I guess that helps with their pledge of free shipping anywhere in the world on any item.
6. There is a special type of item where you bid to buy a certain number of bids that get credited to your account. These are a genius money making idea. Have people pay more money to bid less money. The cost is distributed amongst all bidders, so that in the end, one person ends up saving a few bucks. To enhance the profit potential even more, have some of your bots bid up the price! Brilliant!
That is my reasoning as to why I believe Winners24.com is a scam.
Topics: Uncategorized |
November 7th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I am a regular guy who is very averse of such sites and for all that we know it could be a scam too but think like a business.. they are still profiting by paying full price for auction item. eg: if the final bid price for 32 GB Ipod is $499 and the total bid price is $9.95, winners.com has actually pocketed $995 in bids and pay only $499 for new Ipod. I totally agree with you that its a BRILLIANT idea.
November 10th, 2008 at 06:38 pm
I checked out the site and you bring up some good points. Since the site just started (no earlier than August) I don’t think they have the visitors to sustain the type of intensive bidding thats needed. So I agree I think the users aren’t real. In addition, they have a low alexa ranking.
However, I think its a good idea. However, to spend $1 to have a chance a winning a $200 I don’t see it becoming sometime huge. They will need to change their business model in order to capture the traffic needed and exactly grow.