Apparently, the pay-per bid auction site Swoopo shut down last year. I talked to someone this morning who told me that it was shut down because of financial irregularities, although I am more inclined to believe that simply failed financially.
Goodnight, Swoopo: The Pay-Per-Bid Auction Site Is Dead
By John Biggs
TechCrunch
Mar 27, 2011
When I first wrote about Swoopo back in 2008 I found it abhorrent. It was, in short, a form of gambling masquerading as an auction site. You paid for bids – the more bids you bought the better the chance that you’d be able to pay a reduced price for a certain item. The real money came from the suckers who ran up the price. All those previous bids, at $1, were junked in the process.
They called it entertainment shopping. Now, however, I call it dead.
The company filed for bankruptcy in Germany on the 23rd and although the site appears to be down due to “technical difficulties,” I think the difficulties are more financial. Technologizer has found that the company is finding a liquidator to divest its assets and all bidders with current balances with the company are SOLwoopo.
Some of Swoopo’s competitors are still around (I feel I must refrain from linking to them except in excoriation and so I’ll avoid that here) but hopefully they will suffer the same fate. Fools and their money, as they say, are soon parted. It becomes immoral when the ones doing the parting have stacked the deck in their absolute favor.
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