After seeing an ad for this on BYOND, I deicded to make a quick post warning fellow BYONDers about it. There is a new site on the interwebs advertising itself called "Swoopo". It tries to disguise itself as a auction site, but is really just a huge vacuum taking as much money, from as many people as possible. Let me explain..

Swoopo lists name brand merchandise and electronics at ultra low prices. When you want to bid on something, you have to use auction bidding credits, which cost you around $1.00 each. Every single time you place a bid on a item on Swoopo, it takes a credit. It does not matter if you won the auction or not, you loose that credit.

Each time a person bids on a item, it increases the auction end time by a few seconds, effectively allowing more people to bid on the merchandise you are trying to acquire. It also increases the cost value of the product. Lets say you won an auction, at $175.00 and you used 50 credits bidding on that action. You end up spending $225.00 on that product. Plus whatever shipping might be.

Swoopo also lists "100% Off" auctions, where you are bidding for products that are considered "free". But keep in mind, that you are using credits each and every single time you make a bid on that product. I have seen people bid on 100% free auctions, that end up spending $2,000.00 in credits, when they could have bought the product in the store for half of that.

Whats worse, there have been accusations going around, that Swoopo uses different websites, for different parts of the world. Not a big surprise there. What is, is the claims, that, the websites and products, will share auction ID numbers with several other different products, from other sites, all connected. So what happens?

1. You are bidding on a Laptop on the US Swoopo site
2. A person in the UK is bidding on a different laptop on the UK Swoopo site.
3. Both auctions share the same auction id numbers and are effectively connected to one another.
4. Whenever either site gets a bid, it drives up both prices and auction times for both products.

Swoopo seems really sketchy and I would advise you to stay away from it. It is less of a auction website and more like gambling.