Entertainment Shopping - Swoopo.com Entertainment Shopping, Inc Gambling, not bidding harvard, Illinois

Swoopo.com is a website that labels itself "Entertainment Shopping". The idea, I thought, was that you bid on items you would otherwise like to purchase. You must purchase bids (60 cents a piece) in lots of 40 or more in order to participate.

I heavily researched Swoopo before purchasing $72 worth of bids. Some websites said it was a scam and that it was impossible to win. Others said that it really was a great site and worked well. In hindsight, the sites that said this had something to gain, I'm sure.

Every auction I have bid on has been problematic. The site lags and results in lost bids. More importantly, you are not bidding on items! You are betting that no one else clicks the bid button before you do. What do I mean by this?

On eBay, when you click on "bid" you know exactly how much you are bidding. You must enter the amount. Then you must submit your bid. This also holds true for other "live" bidding sites like Bidz.com. Not so on Swoopo.

Say your item of choice is currently going for $50. At 5 seconds, you decide to bid. Unfortunately, the 10 other people watching decide to as well. So now you've spent $.60 and your bid is lost somewhere in a list of 10 simultaneous bids. Swoopo has no system for dealing with this. They do not alert you that the amount shown when you bid is no longer the amount you bid. They also do not protect you from wasting your $.60 on a bid that was meaningless.

I have filed a report with PayPal and requested a refund for my transactions. I lost 2 auctions due to lag. Again, I am not disgruntled that I lost these auctions. I am upset that this "auction" site is nothing more than a modern, skirting the law version of gambling.