Over the weekend the penny auction site for new cars, FastPennyCars.com closed their fourth car auction on the pay-to bid format.
FastPennyCars’ August 27th penny auction offered bidders the chance to win a choice of 1 of 5 cars, all 2011 models: Dodge Charger, Ram 1500, Journey Crew, Challenger or a Jeep Wrangler. MSRP value: $33360.00.
The car auction finally ended on Sunday, and the winner was declared to be CURLZPAL. However, CURLZPAL isn’t the only user who “won” the car.
According to one bidder, the auction closed with him being the winner hours prior. He even received a win e-mail confirmation only to hear later from the penny auction site that he didn’t really win.
He told us,
“Auction was for $33,360.00 choice of cars. They took in about $35,220.00 with my successful bid of $352.20
After 12 hours yesterday I was declared the successful bidder by their web site as well as confirming email.
They called a short time later and said never mind, their server crashed. If it crashed how did it accept my bid and declare me the winner? I have email and screenshots of the web site.
They restarted the auction from there.
The auction finally ended today and they took in over 3 times what they would have if they let me win.
Looks like the final ‘winning bid’ of $1,085.04
brought them $108,504.00 in bids.Go figure.
Doesn’t look right to me.”
As the winner’s choice auction was actively ending on FastPennyCars Saturday evening we saw that they had posted a few messages on their Facebook fan page about server issues.
The FastPennyCars site went down for maintenance numerous times Saturday night:
Saturday at 10:31 pm FastPennyCars posted the following message on their Facebook fan page:
“The only equitable thing to do is to bring the auction back up and let it end cleanly. Otherwise, everyone who has spent time and money on it would be cheated. When the auction has concluded, we will be working with our server hosting company to resolve the issue with our servers. Thank you for your continued understanding.”
As with any technology penny auctions are not exempt from experiencing server lags and other technical issues; however, it’s of my opinion that after these glitches FastPennyCars should have refunded bids placed by all bidders and restarted the auction fresh from $0.
The bidder who told us he won the car received a refund for all bids purchased on FastPennyCars.com, but did other bidders receive a refund?
Not only did the above bidder tell us he won, another bidder who thought he was a winner e-mailed us yesterday as well.
He told us that he didn’t get a win message e-mail, but his username was up when the site showed the auction was over:
“I tried to bid on fastpennycars.com last night, was the winning bid and actually watched the timer go down to 0, then the site shut down and added 10 more minutes. It was showing like $564 or something but the extra time gave bidders time to regroup. If they would have ended then it would have left them with 34k in bids or so but since they added the extra time they ended up with 108k in bids.”
“Then early in the AM I went back to check on the auction but it said it had ended at $642 or so and showed the screename of the girl who won. A while later I went back and the auction was going again so they obviously did the same thing to her.”
“Also when this auction was going on live it bumped several people off TWO TIMES and they RESTARTED the Car Auction claiming server errors ?I asked for a refund and this is what I was told: Per your request on Live Chat, I am forwarding this email to our Accounting Department for your refund request of today’s auction. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.”
“Can you answer some interesting questions for us below? I participated as User ID “…..”I was logged on from around 6:45AM Saturday morning, to around 5:30 Sunday morning, August 28. I was given several thousands of dollars to participate from the magazine and newpaper, and I filmed the entire auction. We have not had time to review the film just yet, but could you please respond to the following:1) For the last few weeks we watched every gas card auction. I know what every card’s final bid was for the last two weeks. For instance, on Wedneday at 3:20 PM, the Mobil 100 went for $487. Following that was a 50 pack for .02, then a BP 100 for .17, a Bass Pro 50 for .06. I tracked every “bidder” (ID). When you car auction started at 8am on Saturday, during the early “coutdown”, I was aghast at how many “bidders” I had never seen before, in fact, just about every “bidder” had not bid in the last few weeks on anything. Can you explainthis?2) At 11:30 am, “bidders” boo16, bigdean, crbrooks92, mynewcar, angus, cleopatch, josh723, skiquik, dhaley6362, milijj, double07, mattingly23,carder,zythen, and several more, started bidding. I had never seen those IDs in the past. Can you explain?3) At noon, the auction was at $123. New “bidders” hay-d, vegasboy89032, jhawk41, xyndail, viper42330, qniknam, mrsdeagle, lawnchair, and about 20 more started bidding. Again, based on gas card bidding for the previous week, these were all new “bidders” to us. Can you explain?4) At 1pm, a series of new “bidders” appeared. We had never see them in the past – pgmd, meanbidness, ptwiz, volley11 and several more more. Can you explain?5) At 2pm the first server “error” happened. I called and was told “we are investigating the problem”. Then a message appeared on the site “We are updating auction info”. Can you shed some light as to what you are updating? Why was I told, when I called for the first outage, that you don’t know what the problem is, and you are investigating, when it seems all your outages were “planned” from the start- they all occur exactly at the top of the hour or exactly at the half hour. The outages clearly are not glitches or server errors.6) After the 2pm server recycle, during the 10 minute countdown, all new “bidders” started bidding. None of them had placed a single bid previously, and we had not seen them in any previous auctions. This is strange. Can you explain? It seems that the “updating of auction information” resulted in several new “bidders”, see #7 below:7) Beginning at 2pm, about 40 “bidders” we have never ever seen before started bidding – smik90, mhack, enzo, sbghfan, bombert11, dshardie, 666, baru12134, and many more. How can this be?8) At 3pm, a new set of “bidders” we have never seen before appear – shinjin, bbb86, ifamode, ulose, etc. Many of them place only one bid and are never heard from again. Can you explain?9) At 7:30pm, another “auction update” and the auction stops for 10 minutes. When it starts, again, during the 10 minute countdown, there is a flurry of bidding by new “bidders”. Why would anyone even bid during this part of the countdown?10) When the 7:30 auction update occurred, there was another auction going on for a 100 bid pack. Four people were bidding at the time of the outage. Why wasn’t this auction restarted?11) After the recycle, “bidders” who hadn’t been active for 4-6 hours began showing up again. Very strange. Can you explain?12) Another “auction update” outage at 10:30. Strangely, after the update, a new group of “bidders” appears – jrodd, gnobile, justsayno, shaykill, grahambo14, bankrj, tompu177, bigc, and many many more. How can a recycle once again result in a throng of new “bidders” suddenly appearing?13) At 11:30pm, the auction is at $555.30, and I have 9262 bids left. Again, a new group of “bidders” – flawless007, hockeyhobo, david38, stroker, tracytodd, and more. Can you explain?14) At 2am Sunday morning, another “auction update” outage. In the 10 minute countdown period, once again, a new set of “bidders” kicks in and the price rises again – ohiostate, perg81, ponchibego, plzletmewin, and more. How can another outage result in several new “bidders” joining the party?15) After 2am, I turned on cruise control, and this resulted in a flurry of bids from gnobile0711, cat_22 which was strange. “Bidder” DirtPoor woke up from his sleep, placed one bid, and was never heard from again – is this not strange?16) Bidders darrell and darrell101 bid at different times – same person?17) Around 2am, with 9000 bids remaining, we calculated if we bid once every 5 seconds to use all our bids, it will take another 4.5 hours to complete. We start clicking away as we can barely stay awake. We assumed, with 9000 bids, we would easily win the car. However, a couple of “bidders” must have had more than that and spent several hundreds or even thousands of dollars more than us. Is this true?18) Strange that several “bidders” have almost the same ID – flawless007 (who bid only one or twice and left, that is strange), doveb007, double07 – is this just a coincidence they are all James Bond fans?19) During our 9000 bid frenzy for 4.5 hours, where we bid just about every 5 seconds or less, new “bidders” would pop up, place a bid or two, and never be heard from again. Isn’t this strange, given the time of day? Who is going to be up at 4am to bid once or twice and just leave?20) After being up more than 24 hours, we had to get some sleep. When we woke up this morning, our screen shot shows saadalhajri as the winner at 8:22 am. Then we we refreshed the screen, we see that curzpal is the lucky winner of the car at 9:21am. So, who is the lucky winner? Can you let us know a little about this person who will be receiving a car, and where he/she lives? We would like to interview him/her.21) Overall, our biggest shock was that, after monitoring the gas card auctions for weeks, we started knowing all the “bidders”. We expected to see most of them bidding on the car. Instead, most did not bid, in fact, over 100 new “bidders” appeared for this car auction, mostly appearing after each server “auction update”. Can you explain why over 100 bidders, who had never partaken in any auctions, suddenly appear for the car?
OVERALL EXPERIENCE: To be fair, I did win some gas cards and they were delivered just fine. But, we can’t get over the coincidences, strange behavior, server “auction update” recycles, and most of all, the huge number of mysterious new bidders we have never ever seen, some of which just bid once or twice, at strange hours, and then leave. The overall experience was not a good one, and begs the questions how legit is the car auction? Can you explain how, given our experience, we can be assured your next car auction will be legit?
OVERALL RATINGS (1=poor, 5=great):
A. Car Auction Experience: 1 – planned server recycles and “updates”, mysterious new bidders
B. Gas Card Experience: 3 – strange bidding there as well, but we won some cards and they are usable
C. Customer Service: 5 – helpful, nice, easy to get in touch with
– that’s it for now. After we get some sleep, we’ll review the entire auction video and might have some more questions.”
This last bidder told us that he saw the ending winner change from SAADALHAJRI to CURLZPAL who is still up there as the winner right now:
Last month I contacted the winner of FastPennyCars’ second car auction to see if he would be willing to do a live interview since I’m located in his same state, but I did not receive a response to the inquiry. At first I found it interesting that he was personal friends on Facebook with the first winner who won the Camaro and was from Michigan, but it looks like they may have became friends after they both won.
I just checked now and found that the second winner, Matthew Crouse was interviewed here locally by WCCO/CBS news.
How many times did this weekend’s Winner’s Choice Dodge/Jeep penny auction stop and re-start and why did FastPennyCars.com keep starting the auction from where it left off each time it “ended?” The final end price up on their site now is $1,085.04, winner: CURLZPAL.
Did you participate in this weekend’s car auction on Fast Penny Cars? Let us know what your experiences were and what your thoughts are.
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Ralph August 29, 2011, 6:08 pm
With 9,200+ bids, why would you just start clicking every 5 seconds instead of conserving them and only bidding when necessary? You must be new to PA’s.
With 9,200+ bids I guarantee you I would have won that auction. I know one of those “odd” bidders you named, won’t say which one it is but it’s an actual bidder.
Frank August 30, 2011, 5:29 pm
I held on to my 9000+ bids for 19 hours. I started bidding at 2:30am when it was slowing down. I see you guarantee you would have won with the bids I had – how? I waited 19 hours – no matter how long I would have waited, the bots would have kicked in and outbid me.
ProtoProtoss August 29, 2011, 9:19 pm
smh… some people never learn.
Amanda August 29, 2011, 11:14 pm
But what do you think about them not refunding, stopping & restarting?
Sandy Daenzer August 30, 2011, 11:14 am
Hello,
We have spent a great deal of time researching the answers below and hope they provide a better understanding of our Dodge/Jeep Winner’s Choice Auction which finished on Sunday, 8/28/11.
1.) We have long known that we have two sets of bidders. One set is our daily bidders who are interested in our daily gift card auctions. Another set is those individuals who are only there for the vehicles. These people will sometimes hold bids on our site only to be used when a vehicle is auctioned. There is of course some overlap in these groups. Additionally, we had 214 new bidders during the course of the weekend bringing our registered users to over 8,000. Google Analytics showed we had over 30% first time visitors during the weekend.
2.) See answer #1.
3.) See answer #1.
4.) See answer #1.
5.) Since we had never experienced this problem with our servers freezing before and in an attempt to quickly correct the situation, our generic “Maintenance page” was put up. These freezes were not planned. The errors occurred at 1:32 p.m., 7:31 p.m., 10:33 p.m., 2:04 a.m. & 8:21 a.m. An auction can only officially end and have a winner if no one has placed a bid prior to the time running out completely. With each freeze, there were multiple complaints from bidders who were attempting to bid, but the bid button was not responding and no one could refresh their connection. Therefore, we continued to operate under our Terms & Conditions which state:
“A system outage has occurred if no bids can be submitted for items due to an unforeseeable disruption in a system. In such a case, auctions will be temporarily paused and the remaining time for the auctions, the current bidding price and the current highest bidder will be recorded. After the disruption has been resolved, the auctions will be continued and 10 minutes will be added to the remaining times for the auctions.”
6.) There are several scenarios which could possibly explain why and when individuals decide to bid on an auction, all of which are purely speculation: maybe they were the first bidders to get to the site’s home page and realize the auction was going to continue, or possibly they may have decided to take advantage of the fact people who were bidding before were not, or yet another factor could be they were hoping everyone else had given up and this was their chance. We have no way of knowing. Every single bidder on our website is a real individual. The reasons why people chose to participate in the manner they do is unlimited and speculative.
7.) See answer 6. Smik90, mhack, bombert11, dshardie, were new users that day. Enzo was a new user since the day before. Sbghfan has been a bidder since 7/11/2011. 666 has been a bidder since 7/23/2011 and also bid on the Mustang auction. baruiz1234 has been a bidder since 08/06/2011.
8.) Shinjim placed 450 bids, Bbb86 placed 15 bids, ifamode placed 24, ulose placed 45. Not a single one of these bidders placed only one bid.
9.) See answer 6 or yet another speculation could be since we feature vehicles and market to automotive enthusiasts, many of our bidders are new to the penny auction model and have bidding behaviors which you do not see from seasoned penny auction bidders. Additionally, when the auction came back up with a reset timer, the only way a bidder could know for sure that the site was working again and their bids were registering correctly was to click on the bid button. Therefore, when they saw their bid was accepted then they waited for the 10 minute clock to run down and resumed bidding competitively.
10.) Our website designer recommended we take down as many auctions and graphics shown as possible in an attempt to reduce the load on our servers in an effort to prevent any more auction freezes. The bid pack auction was won by bb2001 for $0.04 because of the freeze. The other three bidders who each placed one bid were given 25 bids each.
11.) Knowledgeable bidders are known to sit back and watch other bidders fight with each other draining away bids before they will jump back in. It is possible they may have seen the auction restart as a good time to get back in. Once again, this is speculation. However, this was an opportunity to win a $33,000 vehicle and many may have been waiting for any advantage or opportunity to win.
12.) Jrodd has been a bidder since 8/6/2011 and has only bid on cars and bid packs. Gnobile has been a bidder on our site since 7/23/2011 and also bid on the Mustang. Justsayno has been bidding on our site since 7/20/2011. Grahambo14 has been a bidder on our site since 7/22/2011 and has bid on this vehicle and the Mustang auction. Bankrj, tompul77, bigc, and shayk11 were new bidders.
13.) Flawless007 was a bidder as of 8/20/2011 who has only bid on a bid pack and this auction. Hockeyhobo11, david38, stroker were new bidders. Tracytodd has been a bidder on our site since 8/19/2011.
14.) Ohiostate 711 and perg81 have been bidders on our site since 7/23/2011 and 7/24/11 respectively and only bid on bid packs and cars. Ponchibego was a new bidder only bidding on this auction. Plzletmewin was a new bidder on 8/26/2011 only bidding on bid packs and this auction.
15.) It is possible they had their cruise control on also. DirtPoor placed 48 bids on this auction. After 2 a.m., DirtPoor placed a total of 39 bids rather than one single bid as you claim.
16.) There was no darrell bidding on this auction. Darrell101 was a new bidder only bidding on bid packs and this auction.
17.) There were several bidders who were aggressively attempting to win this auction.
18.) Flawless007 spent 36 bids on this auction rather than the 3-6 bids you claim. We have no idea why or how individuals choose their user names.
19.) See Answer 11. You were bidding relentlessly. In a big auction like this one, many bidders will hang back and wait for aggressive bidders to exhaust all their bids. Typically, they will only place a bid when needed to keep the auction going while waiting for their opportunity after the aggressive bidders have run out of bids.
20.) Our servers froze a total of 5 times resulting in 5 illegitimate winners. The auction froze the fifth time at 8:22am. We then forced the auction to a 5 second timer in an effort to bring the auction to an official end. In order to keep it fair for everyone, we had to keep the auction running until it ended per our Terms & Conditions. That took place at 9:21 am. The official winner is curzpal who lives in Arizona. We will ask the winner whether they will agree to be interviewed by you.
21.) See answer 1. With each vehicle auction, we have seen a significant increase in new bidders the day of the vehicle auction.
We hope it is apparent from the amount of data we needed to review to prepare a thorough answer in conjunction with the immense amount of time we have been spending to provide the best customer support to our bidders possible, while also working tirelessly to correct these problems explains why we were unable to provide our response within the 4hours from the time we received your email on Sunday, 8/28 at 12:03 p.m. to the time of your post on the same day at 4:00 p.m.
In closing, we have not experienced these server issues with any of our other auctions. We are working diligently with our website designer and server hosting company to make sure these problems do not occur again. We followed our Terms & Conditions to continue the auction to its natural completion. To have granted a win because our servers froze and no one else was able to bid even though they were trying is not fair or right.
FASTpennycars.com has completed and awarded four beautiful brand new vehicles. We are excited that we have been able to provide an amazing, thrilling and knuckle whitening experience for us and our bidders. We look forward to providing another amazing opportunity with our Ford Winner’s Choice Auction on September 10.th
We also want to extend our thanks to our loyal and supportive bidders. We greatly appreciate your patronage at FASTpennycars.com!
Sincerely,
Sandy Daenzer
Vice President
Innovative Internet Enterprises, LLC
FASTpennycars.com
Pete August 30, 2011, 9:40 pm
In your ‘In closing’ paragraph where you state that “to continue the auction to its natural completion” yet in paragraph 20 you state “We then forced the auction to a 5 second timer in an effort to bring the auction to an official end.”
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Which is it? A natural conclusion or a forced conclusion?
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What about the people out there that still wanted to bid? You had no concern for them when you “forced” the auction to come to an end?
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I am not sure I follow your logic
Amanda August 31, 2011, 6:58 am
What about the people who were still bidding, wanted to bid and thought it had ended so they went to bed?
rob September 2, 2011, 5:14 pm
Aren’t you the one who works for fastpennycars but disguised herself to be an “enthusiastic bidder” on the forum as a marketing ploy?? suburbangreen right?? If so, there’s nothing you can say that I trust. You’ve lost credibility from that.
Pete September 4, 2011, 12:25 am
Sandy Daenzer is also the Treasurer of Blumfield Township near the headquarters of FastPennyCars, go figure.
Pete August 30, 2011, 1:29 pm
Sandy Daenzer has provided a wealth of information in her recent post. It all supports the reality that bidder ‘adamscheck’ is a winner as evidenced by the screenshot and the email confirmation as to being a winner.
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Let’s apply her statements to an auction where bidders travel to an auction site to participate.
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Being new to the game, FastPennyCars by their own admission hosted their web site with a company that did not adequately meet their needs. This would be the same as holding an auction in a small building. This was fine with previous auctions. Not anticipating a significant increase in people, they did not move to a bigger building before this auction. Some people could not get in and had to stand in the parking lot.
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This is not a technical disruption but a logistical misstep.
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If it was a technical error the winning email would never have gone out to adamscheck.
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Those people in the parking lot could not get in to bid so FastPennyCars admits erasing the winner inside the building and repeatedly moving the auction to bigger buildings allowing the people in the parking lot to get in.
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FastPennyCars also admits to changing the rules of the game midstream to suit their needs.
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They forced the 15 second timer “to a 5 second timer” much like an auctioneer who was tired of moving his auction to a bigger and bigger building. Instead of shouting “GOING ONCE, GOING TWICE, SOLD! He simply shouts “SOLD” when he has had enough.
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How is that fair to those who participated earlier? Different rules.
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FastPennyCars claims they wanted to be fair to all those who wanted bid but in reality not everybody standing in the parking lot can have a chance to bid in the small auction house, even if they claim to be delayed by traffic on the way to the auction house.
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If FastPennyCars desires to be a respected player in the online auction business they will make things right with successful bidders with “winning email confirmations” like adamscheck from this auction. If the server was not working properly that email never would have gone out.
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If not, FastPennyCars will be spending a great deal of their profits on legal fees…
Justin August 31, 2011, 2:35 am
So glad I didn’t bid on that. They had sent me an email informing me the night before that the auction would start the next morning. I woke up after it had started i figured i would sit back and study it a little bit before i even thought about purchasing any bids. I watched for about 30 minutes then went and did some things came back and saw someone had won. But the timer was still counting down to restart or something? So i waited and it restarted but at the same price it stopped at, c’mon really? Does that really seem fair to all those people who spent all that money and placed all those bids. If your having so called “technical issues” shut down your site and be prepared to refund EVERY SINGLE BID that was placed on that auction. Its not the bidders fault it went down. It is a car for sale if you know that you are going to have a ton of users on your server bidding, don’t you think you should have all that tested beforehand. Until i see an incredible improvement on their part i highly doubt i will be bidding on that site anytime soon.
Mark September 10, 2011, 9:49 pm
I think the best way to handle these clowns moving foward is to deal with their affiliates. The car dealerships that supply the vehicles. There is only three of them. Give them all a call and find out if this is the type of business partners they do business with.
Fast Penny Cars October 27, 2011, 7:44 am
This article is so good for those peoples who are very fond of fast cars, this is totaly good for wining the cars.just go to the website, and see more details.
Fast Penny cars.
JustK December 27, 2011, 2:40 pm
I would just like to say I am one of those accounts you listed. And personally I agree with you. Some fishy stuff did happen that day. I complained and wrote in as well. But I am not an employee of this foul smelling website.
I was up at 8:00a ready to start bidding. I sit back and watch the auction and just for the record I was a new member and I wasn’t going to waste my bids on cards and stuff also, I bid more than ONE time. Want to know how I made that mistake, I put it on cruise control because I did not know exactly what it was but found out quickly. If I only bought a little bid package why would I just keep bidding, so I can see all my little bids go down the drain. No!! But anyway, the website is quit suspect.
But on that day I witnessed 3 winners and that’s when I said forget this, it’s a scam. But like you I thought wait a minute this has to be the employees trying to keep the auction going so they can get top dollar back. And I stated that in the live chat to customer service. And that is why you did not see me bid anymore. But like some when I saw the first winner I got back in the bed and woke up later on to just check the website and low and behold, the auction was still running. I was telling a sibling, because I was disgusted “look this crap still going man, they cheating, this some bull” were some of the phrases that were said. I showed the sibling the 1st winner ended auction as well, so they knew I was telling the truth.
But I know this article is a little old and I am responding now because I just decided today to look up some reviews on this website and I found this. Also, the website has made some changes but I will speak on that briefly because I have already said the website smells. So currently they have you can buy regular bids and car bids. A former contractor sent many account holders an email disposing the new things happening at FP.
So that email somewhat confirmed my suspicion. FP quickly issued an apology stating he was disgruntled contractor yada yada. And now as of December 27, 2011 the website is down and has been down for a while now. So I guess the people who bought car bids ($200 on up) is shit out of luck. Glad I had since 2 weeks ago to just bid on anything, to get rid of them and hope I win but hey I am just out of $45. Feel sorry for those out of $100 to $1000.
But in fairness the company should have went out there way to give EVERY SINGLE PENNY BACK (said with tight lips) to everyone who bid and start the auction over as stated by someone earlier. To be honest I wish I printed the terms and condition because they probably changed that as well after the so called glitches.
But in the end I have washed my hands with this website. And Good Luck to those future and present account holders.