Dominic Sparks

One autumn’s day, way back when I was a child, my mother told me “Catch a leaf, and you can make a wish”.  In my innocence I believed that catching the leaf would guarantee that the wish would come true.  You could say, I was taken in by the promise of something for nothing.  And you’d think I’d have learned better by now.

But yet in a way I’m still looking out for leaves to catch; for opportunities that promise all I could wish for; for things that are so good that they are almost too good to be true.  And it’s this instinct that led me to almost get sucked in by the penny-auction website Swoopo.co.uk.  I’d seen it discussed in this news article and, being an excellent judge of character, decided that the guy who was talking was obviously being totally genuine, honest, and open, and that the negative comments about the site were probably a bit harsh.  Whilst swoopo has come under immense criticism for the way it operates, he suggested that in fact anyone can win an auction, and that people win very often by employing various clever tactics.  I had to try it for myself; being a clever guy it shouldn’t be beyond me to figure out what these tactics should be.  In actual fact, the way things turned out, it didn’t take me very long to realize that the promises of this site really are too good to be true.

The trouble with Swoopo, as discussed at length in The Register, is that it’s virtually impossible to bid on an auction with any degree of confidence that you’ll win.  Unlike ebay, where a bid in the last few seconds will give you a reasonable chance of winning, a bid in the last few seconds on Swoopo has the opposite effect; It causes the auction to be extended, allowing others to out bid you.  And this happens continually. For the novice user, that means any one-off bids you make are generally wasted.  And once you’ve figured out what’s going on, and started using the bid-butlers (automatic pickpockets that bid ‘on-your-behalf’) you realise that to win an auction you either have to be incredibly lucky, or you have to invest a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and a reasonable amount of cash.  The big problem is that the bid-butlers bid against each other, push the price up, and prolong the auction. Only when the other bidders have decided to give up are you likely to win;  And that’s where the luck comes in.  Unlike an ebay auction that has a set end time, and where you can have a reasonable guess at the final value and what is a reasonable bid, with the swoopo auction you have absolutely no idea. To win you need to bid when the auction is nearly ended, but the only way to do that is to guess, or to keep actively bidding in the auction.  And the real problem with this strategy is that the bids themselves cost you money – 40p each in fact.

It took me a tenner to prove to myself that Swoopo really is too good to be true.  Many people would describe it as a rip-off.  Perhaps the most devious thing about the whole set up is the promise of something for nothing, and the misleading information that pervades the whole site.  Whilst it may claim that you can get a £1000 imac for £35, it gives no indication of the true cost. If you think about how the bidding works, and how hard it is to win, and how much the bids cost, do the maths and it’s fairly clear that the winner of this £35 auction is likely to have spent considerably more than that on making dozens of bids at 40p a shot.

In future I shall steer well clear of sites like this  – I closed my account as soon as my bids were used up.  And before I try to catch any more falling leaves, I’ll think a bit more carefully about what they really have to offer…