Do we have to pay you $0.60 for every comment from now on?

Engineer, just for you, it's only a quarter. Just don't tell everyone; they'll want the same deal.

J.

Chumps. Kevin's been giving me a 15 cents per post rate for years - and on days when I'm active, I get five for a dollar.

Of course I had to buy the $100 Gold Membership to get that rate, but the savings add up fast.

I looked at one of those too. It quickly became apparent that it's basically a gambling operation. As usual, the game is rigged so the house always wins.

Yeah, I looked at those also - it was pretty clear that at a buck a penny bid you could lose some hefty change quickly. And if you get auction fever, the potential for loss was REALLY high.

(Plus - now that I think about it, I wonder how many of those bids are bots, programmed to push things up to a certain level so no money's lost on the item.)

I've been charging my comments to Hugo Chavez Paypal account.

If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Then again Obama got tens of millions of votes so there is a big market for scam sites like those.

It's totally a scam. Each bid costs a dollar. That watch that only cost you $1.15 really cost you $21.15 because you bid 20 times. Plus all the bids everyone else made means that $50 watch made them $115 dollars.

With that said, there are ways to beat the system. I used my free bids and bid strategically and got a Blu-Ray Sony 7.1 system for $0.99 plus shipping. But that's the exception and I won't be "gambling" there any time soon.

I read that they had 12 winners a month on items. Half the bids are for more credits. Lottery type odds. The big losers....YOU.

I believe I might actually pay Art W a dollar just to go away. Emphasis on "might".

While the sites and described activity are legal, I think it is highly likely that these sites and particularly the people who run them are in fact criminal. I watched one of them with interest. They gave me a free 10 bids. I watched how the exact same people bid repeatedly over and over for the same item, typically even many items. I downloaded the auction numbers and revealed that if the people making those bids paid ~25% of the going rate on average for their bids they were breaking even. Many times they would have had to pay only a few pennies for each bid to make that particular auction a winner for them. I followed 6 particular bidders. Only one of which I concluded was a legitimate bid pack buyer, they just happened to be heavily invested at the start of my review.

I understand that they could in theory win enough of those bids in bid pack auctions on the site, or maybe even have special arrangements to buy at a discount. For the first idea, it would have required these individuals to have built up significant numbers of bids well in advance of the auctions I watched, as the number of bid packages that were present on the site in the two week period was very much insufficient to account for more than 25% of their bids and that was calculating up the idea that they won 80% of the listed bid packages, which for the record, it did not appear as though they did. For the second idea, it would definitely have to break the law if they had such an arrangement with outside groups that they essentially made guaranteed winners by selling bids for effectively less than 25% of the cost they charge for everyone else, particularly dependent on the relationship with that outside group, as well that it is not documented that these groups have this outweighed level of advantage.

So, while the site idea is perfectly legitimate, if not downright stupid to pay to play on. I think the activities of the owners of the sites certainly cross the line from legal to illegal in some ways.

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