My answer is ‘Almost‘!

These sites (and there are plenty of copycats) appear to operate as eBay-type auctions, but they have several important unlike eBay, when the auction ends, it doesn’t!

These are not real, fair auctions like you’d expect – you bid in tiny increments, say a penny – but, every penny costs you around 60 cents (or equivalent local currency) and every bid costs money so the more bids, the more money the ‘house’ gets.

It’s obvious;y a huge money spinner – a few ordinary goods seem to be going for $5, when in reality they can be paid for many times over by the losing-but-paying other bidders.

This system and the interminable nature of these auctions (the clock gets reset every time a new bid is received) means that the end result is a lottery. This is a fact that these sites want very much to suppress as the legal rules change a great deal if this is the case, but the fact remains that any logical examination of the system points to a lottery or some other form of gambling.

I tried this out for a day, lost $50 and helped the profits of Swoopo incrementally. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have the time and money and persistence (and luck) to actually snag one of those HDTVs for $20, but they are very much in the minority.

My advice? Avoid these sites like the plague that they are – if you want to gamble, buy a lottery ticket or play online poker, just don’t waste your time and money on Swoopo!

I give my cellphone number out to very few people. Friends, relatives, Scamdex-related business and the occasional on-line order, if they insist. So when I get a call, it’s normally someone I know personally or business. So I was surprised to get a call from an outfit called ‘Auction Profits LLC’ (http://www.auctionprofitsllc.com) , asking me if I want to make money with drop-shipping on eBay.

After listening to their inept spiel which seems to involve mentioning eBay and MONEY as often as possible, I asked them where they got my phone number and name. The claim was that I had placed an order with another company called ‘Online Supplier’ (http://www.onlinesupplier.com) . They knew my name, address and phone number and indicated that they had additional credit card information as well.

When I persisted, I was zapped to the supervisor who blustered about how I must have bought something from them before and, anyway, how about making some money on eBay?

He completely missed the point that I made that I run a website devoted to exposing scams (such as his) and he dropped my call. I got a weird ‘private’ call a few minutes later (2 minutes of static followed by a ’sorry wrong number’) which I strongly suspect was them.

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e-Gold, in Melbourne, Florida issued the following shock announcement on their website.

“On April 24, 2007, a Federal Grand Jury handed down an indictment charging e-gold Ltd., Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc., and the Directors of both companies with money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmitter business, and conspiracies to commit both offenses.”

If half of what they claim is correct, they are being subjected to overreaching and unfair treatment by the US Justice Department. Obviously this is a legal area that challenges the most experienced legal & financial minds and breaks new ground on long-founded laws, designed to deal with bricks and mortar institutions (banks) and bricks of actual gold.

They go on to claim that their security measures are more stringent than those of banks, and that as they only ever accept bank-to-bank transfers (no cash or check operations), they cannot be accused of money laundering as no money is involved.

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A news report in eWeek has me chuckling ruefully. A Romanian calling himself ‘Vladuz’ is causing havoc at eBay and eBay has been forced to take notice. Due to a combination of spam phishing attempts by emails such as these, and (he claims) hacking of the eBay databases, he has been able to get access to thousands of eBay accounts, creating bogus listings, which in turn end up being a one-way conduit of cash for the scammer.

This is nothing new. The scale is all that has changed. Scamdex has been working with some brave, tireless, selfless individuals who are so incensed with the listing of obviously (to them) counterfeit, bogus or downright fraudulent auctions that they have bombarded eBay customer support to report and bring down the listings before anyone got caught [more].

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