Is HQBids a Legit Penny Auction? User Charged $49 Without Realizing It

Amanda Lee 1 comment

One of our readers sent us a very discouraging message about the penny auction site HQBids.com, he wrote:

“I tried to find how to purchase an I Pad & found I was onto the HQ Bids site. A “FREE” site. which cost $49 US to join. Alright, I signed up, but found the whole thing stalled when I was asked for MasterCard Secure Code. It said “We will get back to you”. When? And how? Is this a scam? There doesn’t seem to be any provision to log in to bid.”

On HqBids.com ending right now there are 4 new iPads, 2 iPhones, a Google Nexus 7, PS3, Galaxy Tab 2, gold bar, Nintendo Wii Bundle, Toshiba laptop, LG 50 inch TV, xBox 360 with Kinect and dozens of new items ending soon.

Take a look at each auction and watch the bidding patterns closely… The majority, if not all, usernames are one syllable names, not common usernames.

For instance: lupo, tarpley, mclean, deaton, christie, searle, edward, thomas, conner, to name just a few who are currently bidding.

Alexa tells us that this site has a pretty low traffic ranking and is very popular in Kolkata (West Bengal).

”Statistics Summary for hqbids.comThere are 492,149 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Hqbids.com. The site has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of Kolkata (#33,286), and approximately 78% of visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 113,899. Visitors to Hqbids.com spend about five minutes per visit to the site and 67 seconds per pageview, and approximately 9% of visits to the site are referred by search engines.”Interesting?

Who owns HqBids.com? Well, the domain name registrant info is protected by “Contact Privacy, Inc.”

Registrant:
Contact Privacy Inc. Customer 0126868198
96 Mowat Ave
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1
CA
Domain name: HQBIDS.COM

Administrative Contact:
Contact Privacy Inc. Customer 0126868198,

HQBids “About Us” page is minimal at best:

“is a free to join, members only e-commerce site. We specialize in providing our members with instant access to top brands at up to 98% off retail. All products offered for sale come with the manufacturer warranty and are the same brand new, brand name, and factory sealed products you find in stores”

Their contact info which can be found on their privacy policy page is just an address for UPS Store post office box:
Or by regular mail:
HQbids Customer Support
4798 S. Florida Ave, Suite 117
Lakeland, FL 33813-2181

One tactic used by a lot of what we found to be questionable penny auctions has been to use news clips/interviews with winners of other penny auction sites and label them or make them seem as if the video was about their site, for instance:

Page one of the registration process states “Free sign up, No Free, NO Surprises.” Why then was our reader confused/surprised? See page two of the registration page:

Of course the page states, “We Guarantee you will win today, a bid pack purchase amount, but above address information states “Where will we ship your wins” This format has been known to confuse bidders on other now-shut-down penny auctions where Federal Trade Commission action against site owners has happened.

Two complaints were filed with the Better Business Bureau in Florida:

http://www.bbb.org/central-florida/business-reviews/penny-auctions/hq-bids-in-lakeland-fl-90140637/complaints#breakdown

Another bidder posted the following review to ScamBook.com:

http://www.scambook.com/report/view/226609/HQBids-Complaint-226609-for-$49.00

“I got the starter package and as I was going to win a bid their site froze…it had nothing to do with my computer. I lost everything. What a SCAM!!! I contacted them and they try to blame my computer, bandwidth and more. They sent a nasty email back. SCAM!!!!!!!!”

Check out the bottom of the registration/bid purchase page it states “See what people are saying” below various logos of major media networks that have featured penny auctions, a majority of which actually interviewed me/Penny Auction Watch, this seems very misleading.

Knowing that there isn’t much information about this company, seeing the questionable bidding names and high volume of big dollar items would you bid here? Did you? Did you win? Were you confused by the sign up page like our reader was? Discuss this and all penny auctions in our forum!

Is WellBid.com a Legit Penny Auction? 23 Items Active Now

Amanda Lee 0 comments

WellBid.com claims to have completed an absurdly high number of penny auctions, a banner on the top right corner of their website states: “385,813 Finished Auctions even 95% cheaper.”

Is WellBid a Legit Penny Auction?

WellBid is owned and operated by Welmory Limited, with registered offices based in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Operator - Welmory Limited with its registered office in Nicosia (Cyprus) P.C. 1065 Arch. Makariou III, 2-4/703, formed under the laws of Cyprus and registered in the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Department of Registrar of Companies and Official Receiver Nicosia, under No. HE 245903

According to a LinkedIn page for Welmory Ltd the company owns other penny auctions as well as WellBid in a number of other countries and languages. Each site claims to have offered the same 385,813 completed auctions, but the active items all all different across each site.

Their domain products include the following:

za1cent.sk
por1centimo.es
10forintert.hu
za1cent.sk
za1korunu.cz
per1cent.it
us.wellbid.com
wellbid.de
wellbid.fr

“The Operator of the Service is the company Welmory Limited with its registered office in Nicosia (Cyprus) P.C. 1065 Arch. Makariou III, 2-4/703, formed under the laws of Cyprus and registered in the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Department of Registrar of Companies and Official Receiver Nicosia, under No. HE 245903 with an initial capital of 1,001,000 EUR (one milion one thousand euro), conducting auctions in Europe (United Kingdom, France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal, Russia), Asia, and the Americas. WellBid.com Service is systematically developed. Our goal is to offer users the most interesting forms of competition for exhibited items as well as to provide the most attractive prices of items and services auctioned.”

According to Alexa, WellBid’s traffic ranking is 305,237. WebsiteOutlook says the site is hosted in Poland at Beyond.pl sp. z o.o data center and is “most popular in the United Arab Emirates.”

Have you bid on WellBid? One bidder claims to have won items but not receive them:

The following review was posted to ScamBook:

“Wellbid.co.uk

Complaint 150782 Details Scan your bills for fraudThumbs up 0 Thumbs down Flag
Date Occurred: 08/25/2012Reported Damages: $494.00

Welmory Limited, trading as wellbid.co.uk.

An online auction site for which you purchase bids which are then used in auctions. If you win the auction, you pay the current bid price (in addition to the cost of the bids used) and any postage specified and then should receive the goods.

But you don’t get the goods and they never reply to emails, messages sent via their help pages or even to the dispute resolution service run by PayPal (through which the payments are made).

A quite sophisticated scam; the clues are there that it probably is a scam (bad spelling and grammar used throughout the site) but the use of PayPal lends it an air of respectability – that’s what fooled me.”

Do you have a similar less than favorable experience with this penny auction site? Let us know, discuss WellBid and all penny auctions with us in our Penny Auction Forum!

Has Everyone Been Talking About “the best penny auction website on the net” BlueBirdBids.com? MLM Marketing Tie – Is It Legit?

Amanda Lee 3 comments

“Everyone is talking about BlueBirdBids and how it’s the best penny auction website on the net.”

Since we are not too sure just who everyone is that has been talking about BlueBirdBids, nor have we read anywhere that it was the best penny auction website on the net, we need to know. Is BlueBirdBids.com a great penny auction site? Is it legit?

Was BlueBirdBids mentioned by Time, Wired, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, Wired or USA Today? Nope. Penny auctions were though, but should they be featuring the logos on top of their landing page appearing to seem to us, and other consumers, as if their site has been featured?

BlueBirdBids is a US Based Penny Auction – So why Malaysia and Colombia?

BlueBirdBids.com is a recently registered corporation based in the state of Nevada – Blue Bird Bids International, Inc with the registered agent being MD EGER. (Mardy Eger) One blogger, as has one of our forum members in the Thank You GreenAppleFridays thread, insists that there is a tie between BlueBirdBids.com and GreenAppleFridays.com, owned by Dwayne Golden. Blue Bird Bids Review: Zeek Rewards Ponzi clone which includes more info and this quote found of Mardy’s site, ”Because of their Iron sharpening Iron relationship, both Mardy and Dwayne continually spiral higher toward more successful endeavors.”

Behindmlm.com discovered a possible tie between GreenAppleFridays.com and BlueBirdBids.com, at one point BlueBirdBids was linking to GreenAppleFriday’s Facebook page.

While BlueBirdBids.com’s terms state, “Deliveries are made exclusively to the 50 states of the United States and Washington D.C.” according to Alexa.com, 43% of their traffic is currently coming from Brazil, users in Colombia are also visiting the penny auction site.

Statistics Summary for bluebirdbids.com

There are 734,487 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Bluebirdbids.com, and while the site is ranked #22,879 in Brazil, where we estimate that 43% of its visitors are… Show More

Interesting, GreenAppleFridays.com also has a good deal of traffic coming from the city of Medillin, Colombia. GreenAppleFriday’s owner has told us and states in the GAF blog that he has a son in Colombia, an entrepreneur that provides SEO services for GreenAppleFridays and other businesses, perhaps this explains the Colombia traffic correlation.

Why does BlueBirdBids’ source code includes tags for Malaysia and Malaysia online shop when they’re a US operating penny auction site?

Statistics Summary for greenapplefridays.com

“Greenapplefridays.com has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 831,861. The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is very small. The site has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of Medellín (#1,632). The site has a bounce rate of approximately 45% (i.e., 45% of visits consist of only one pageview). About 69% of Greenapplefridays.com’s visitors are in Colombia, where it has attained a traffic rank of 9,358. Show Less

BlueBirdBids is offering a lot of higher ticketed items than we usually see for a new site with items including laptops, Plasma TV, $100, $150 and $200 gift cards, iPods, iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire and large denomination bid pack auctions.

MLM Marketers Are Attracted to the Penny Auction Space

Zeekler was a penny auction site that also offeredBack in August Zeekrewards was found to be a $600 Million ponzi scheme and shut down by the Department of Justice/SEC.

Is BlueBirdBids.com operating on a model similar to that of Zeekler’s ZeekRewards?

The website BehindMLM (http://behindmlm.com/companies/blue-bird-bids-review-zeek-rewards-ponzi-clone/) has taken a more in depth look into BlueBirdBids’ MLM program:

“The Blue Bird Bids Product Line

With Blue Bird Bids being a penny auction based MLM opportunity, the primary product of the company is penny auction bids.

Within the Blue Bird Bids penny auction there are two types of bids, retail and “revenue share” bids.

Retail bids cost $1 each, are purchasable by both retail customers and affiliates and are available to purchase in packs of 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500.

Revenue share bids are only available to affiliates and are sold in packs costing between $1000 and $25,000.

The Blue Bird Bids Compensation Plan

Blue Bird Bids offer members retail commissions, a series of mostly recruitment based commissions and the ability to earn monthly and quarterly bonuses via several revenue sharing pools.

Retail Commissions

Blue Bird Bids affiliates are paid a 20% retail commission on the purchase of retail bids by any customers they personally bring into the company.

The Blue Bird Bids Compensation Plan

Blue Bird Bids offer members retail commissions, a series of mostly recruitment based commissions and the ability to earn monthly and quarterly bonuses via several revenue sharing pools.

Retail Commissions

Blue Bird Bids affiliates are paid a 20% retail commission on the purchase of retail bids by any customers they personally bring into the company.

Recruitment Commissions

When a new Blue Bird Bids member joins the company their upline receive a recruitment commission. How much of a commission earnt depends on what level of membership a new Blue Bird Bids affiliate pays for:

Affiliate membership ($99) – $30 paid to the recruiting affiliate, $10 to their direct upline and $10 to their upline’s direct upline

Super membership ($199) – $50 paid to the recruiting affiliate, $20 to their direct upline and $20 to their upline’s direct upline

Pro membership ($299) – $90 paid to the recruiting affiliate, $30 to their direct upline and $30 to their upline’s direct upline

Note that whilst the membership fees are recurring, the recruitment commission is only paid out once.

Global Bonus Pool

The Global Bonus Pool is made up of 1% of the company revenue and is paid out quarterly.

Blue Bird Bids affiliates can earn shares in the Global Bonus Pool depending on which level of membership they buy in at:

Affiliate membership ($99) – 1 share

Super membership ($199) – 2 shares

Pro membership ($299) – 3 shares

Residual Commissions

The residual commissions in Blue Bird Bids are paid out using a 3×8 expandable matrix. A 3×8 matrix places an affiliate at the top of the matrix with three legs branching out from under them.”

Looks like they’re promising recruiters new cars.

Car Bonus

Once affiliates reach specific recruitment goals, Blue Bird Bids reward them with a car of their choice.

If affiliates personally recruit 10 affiliates and have a matrix organisation of 500 affiliates (no more than 1/3rd being counted from any one matrix leg) who have all paid membership fees for at least three consecutive months, they can choose between three budget cars ranging in value from $46,000 to $50,070.

If affiliates personally recruit 10 affiliates and have a matrix organisation of 3000 affiliates (no more than 1/3rd being counted from any one matrix leg) who have all paid membership fees for at least three consecutive months, they can choose between three luxury cars ranging in value from $135,200 to $205,600.”

Ayy… Dubli has been running for many years now and also offers a MLM model. Zeekler’s ZeekRewards spurred tons of spammers “marketing” for Zeekler.com’s penny auction site. They even offered cars for auction, but was Zeekler a legit penny auction? Did you ever win and receive items?

Winner of BlueBirdBids previously promoted for Zeekler’s ZeekRewards:

“Real people like you are winning” well we’d sure like to hope so, but why the emphasis on “real” people and why the boastful remark that “everyone” is talking about them?

I personally don’t care for multilevel marketing, and don’t believe that it’s the best way that penny auctions should be promoted, especially without properly educating and disclosing to consumers just how a penny auction works and the risks involved. Essentially, the multilevel marketers are compensated when consumers make bid purchases.

The problem I have with this is the way they are telling consumers that they will win items at “dirt cheap prices,” (BlueBirdBids.Wordpress.com) when in reality winning a penny auction can end up costing much more money than the MSRP of the item up for auction.

The question that bidders want to know is, is BlueBirdBids.com a legitimate penny auction site? Have items been won and received by bidders? Join us and discuss this penny auction in the Penny Auction Watch Forum.

Over $18K in Items Just on Monday Penny Auction MonsterShop.ca Looks Like Beezid, Is it Legit?

Amanda Lee 0 comments

So we just did the math and this new penny auction that claims to be “Canada’s leading bidding site” has sold in excess of $18,226.08 in merchandise on just Monday alone. Is MonsterShop.ca really Canada’s leading bidding site? “As Canada’s #1 site we offer penny, seat, and free bidding auctions.”

While Merchandise Appears to be High, Alexa Says Traffic is Low

So low, the site has yet to be ranked in Canada. MonsterShop holds a global Alexa rank of 2,634,860. The domain was purchased in September of 2011.

On Monday when we checked out the site they offered both an iMac and a MacBook Air, right now they’re offering up yet another MacBook Air, $100, $250 gift cards, another Dyson vacuum, Sony Home Theatre system, Harmon Kardon Receiver. Recently ended items include: A Bose Sounddock, Samsung Galaxy tablet, TomTom, JVC camcorder, PS3, more $250, $100 gift cards, iPod Touch, iMac, more Dysons, MacBook Air’s, Apple TVs, Blendtec blender. It appears that they have the same bunch of items on a cycle.

Take a look at the names of some of the users who have recently won items:

methodologist
WiZZyWiGG
DonkeyKong
softballgrl85
ians4ever
angel
takingchances
koolkat
Darthtoast
Confusedagain
Madgoat
faceless484
coincontrol
kiddiegoddess
scrapbooker
packerfan
Frugal

While many penny auction sites have legit bidders, we know for certain that the capability and temptation to shill bid by use of automated bidders and manual bidding has been, and will be done by many penny auction sites.

MonsterShop.ca’s Looks Very Familiar – Their Template Looks A lot Like Beezid.com – Also a Canada based penny auction.

What’s Beezid’s Alexa ranking?:

Beezid has a global ranking of 40,683, 14,748 in the US. Beezid runs TV ads, frequent promotions and we know that real people have won items on Beezid.

What company runs MonsterShop.ca? We’re not sure. Their domain was registered privately and their terms & conditions state the business as Monstershop.ca.

“Welcome to our online store! MONSTERSHOP.CA and its associates provide their services to you subject to the following conditions. If you visit or shop within this website, you accept these conditions. Please read them carefully.

We want to hear about your experiences with this and all penny auctions, join us in the forum and discuss MonsterShop.ca.

What do you think? Is MonsterShop.ca a Legit Penny Auction?

Is HqBids.com a Legit or Scam Penny Auction? Tons of High Dollar Items Ending Now

Amanda Lee 2 comments

Have you tried bidding on penny auction site HqBids.com?

HqBids is a Florida registered LLC, the domain was purchased in August of 2010. This penny auction site has a high Alexa traffic ranking, yet tons of high dollar items. “Hqbids.com’s three-month global Alexa traffic rank is 1,286,360. Roughly 2% of visits to this site are referred by search engines, and the site has attained a traffic rank of 345,312 among users in… Show More”

Take a look at all of the items currently ending on this penny auction site:

2x Toshiba LED Laptops
4x 32GB WiFi iPads
Unlocked Apple iPhone
2x LG 42″ 3D TVs
PS3
XBox
Kindle Fire
Nikon Coolpix Digital Camera

All of these items are being bid on and are ending within 60 seconds. HqBids also has more of the same active items in their upcoming auctions lineup for auctions ending today.

HqBids.com states that they have a “Bid for Free – With Bid Protection Program,” but this program

“What is Bid Protection?

Bid Protection is an optional feature that allows you to bid for free. with bid protection, you decide how much you want to win and for how long you would like to continue winning. please go to your account to your to add a bid protection today.”

On the 2nd page of registration there is a sales page that states they will guarantee a win today, if not they will refill bidders accounts:

While HqBids has registered their LLC with the Florida Secretary of State’s office the latest report filing date listed in the database is 4/29/2011. Each company registered in Florida has to submit an annual report no later than May 1st of each year.

Have you bid on HqBids.com and is it a legit penny auction? Tell us about your experiences. Join our forum!

Is Bidmos a Legit Penny Auction?

Amanda Lee 0 comments

Have you bid on Bidmos.com?

Owned by Las Vegas, NV registered corporation, Bidmos, Inc.

Bidmos.com is a penny auction site that currently has an iPad ending in 10 minutes, a Sony Vaio in 20, PS3 in 21, Magic Mouse in an hour, Nikon D40 in two hours, Samsung 3D plasma TV in 2 hours 14 minutes, Garmins, a Macbook Pro, Dolce and Gabbana perfume, Samsung Galaxy S II, Sony Full HD camcorder in 6 hours, HTC HD7, iPhone 4, Windows Ultimate, 5 Night All-Inclusive Cruise ending in 10 hours, A 5Dell Latitude and an HP Envy laptop.

Checking out won/completed auctions we find that the very same items that are actively up for bid today were recently won. End prices very low: $1.27 for a Macbook Pro, with “George” being the winner, HTC HD7 with “Cora” the winner at $0.24, the 5 Night All-Inclusive Cruise was won by “Dominique” for $0.26.

Not only is there a trend in the items being offered, in that they appear to be recycling the same offering, every single bidder that’s displayed on both their live auctions page and ended items page are real first names and not usernames.

Interesting, it’s not often that we see bidders bidding using names for usernames.

Bidmos.com does not require users to sign up just by first name, you can put anything in the username field, so why then are all of their bidders bidding with first names?

Were they Legit in 2010 and Is Bidmos Legit Now?

Let’s take a trip back to 2010. In 2010 we found something very odd on Bidmos.com, when this penny auction site was operating with the PhpPennyAuction script by Scriptmatix, we found what appeared to be bot bidders bidding on this penny auction site. How’d we do that? Well back in 2010 we discovered that there was a flaw in the phppennyauction software, we already knew that back then that Scriptmatix sold this penny auction software solution with a bot functionality (fake bidders) to act as a “reserve” so site operators won’t have to “lose” money on items. The use of bots on a live penny auction site open to the consumer market is, in my opinion, nothing short of theft. Anyway, back in 2010 the flaw was that a user’s e-mail address was somehow publicly exposed on the flawed penny auction site’s code. Accordingly, with the use of Firebug, a developer tool, we found what appeared to be proof of bots and even site owners shill bidding on a number of penny auction sites. The bots were reflected in the email addresses with blank fields and the shill bidding by the shady site operators who were bidding on their own site with actual email addresses pointing to the site owner’s email or the sites e-mail address. For info and screenshots illustrating this check out Requesting an Explanation, and some of these:

So what’s the point? Well, if you clicked on the Bidmos link, the one we posted on Bidmos in 2010, it showed no e-mail addresses for bidders, yet my e-mail address for my test user did. Here’s a screenshot reflecting this:

bidmos

Over the years we have discovered that there have been dozens, if not hundreds, more sites that have used fake bidders to bid against paying consumers…Enough is Enough! This one from way back is classic: Vuulu owner admins to only shipping 1 item.

Back then the site was hosted in Germany:

bidmos

Now the site is hosted in the US and holds a currently active, registered US corporation based registered in Nevada of BidMos, Inc.

2010: According to the Nevada Secretary of State’s office their filing date was 7/26/2010.

Registered Agent: Martin Todorov, Address: 209 S Stephanie Street Suite B 115, appears to be a PostNet mailbox address.

Note how Bidmos’ ended penny auction items are the same as their active items:

If all of their items and bidders are real they appear to be taking quite a loss.

Is this penny auction site legit? Have you ever tried it and won? We want to hear about your experiences bidding on this and all penny auctions. Join our forum: Here!

Bidsson is a New Penny Auction Utilizing Network/MLM Marketing, Offers New VW, Is it Legit?

Amanda Lee 6 comments

Bidsson.com, which according to their about page is a Delaware headquarted company, “owned by several entrepreneurs and is a part of the Bidify company structure who is owned by the same people. (www.bidify.com).”

Curious to find out more about who is behind this company seeing as they have left us with very vague info…

Who Owns Bidify?

Domaintools Whois Info Registrant:

Bidify LLC

Larus Palmi Magnusson ()427 N Tatnall St #15902 Wilmington

Delaware,19801 US Tel. +35.48928857

Creation Date: 01-May-2011Expiration Date: 01-May-2016

The 427 N Tatnall St in Wilmington, DE appears to be an address/mailbox that can be purchased for $16.95, according to www.earthclassmail.com/Delaware-Address:

“A Virtual Presence In Delaware

Street address available:

“Street Address
427 N. Tatnall St.
Wilmington, DE 19801-2230
Just $16.95 per month in addition to Monthly subscription fees
Will-call pickup not available”

Does Bidsson really have a real office in Delaware?

Also, Google cache shows that the Bidify.com domain used to be registered to Mr. Magnusson to an address in the Seychelles. “Unit 117, Orion Mall, Palm Street Victoria Mahe, K1S5P5 SC Te”

Interestingly enough, their previous address that was listed for Bidify, the Unit 117, Orion Mall, Palm Street address points to belong to SFM LTD, an offshore corporation registration company.

What is Bidsson?

Bidsson’s young age isn’t stopping them from offering high-end items. First a cruise, now a car.

Currently this penny auction site is offering a rather high priced item, a new economy car from Volkwasgen, the Volkswagen Up. While Bidsson tells us they are a Delaware based company, the currency reflected in the auction’s page is the € Euro and the Up is currently only available in markets outside of the United States. The Up is valued at approximately $9,800 USD.

Bidsson only shows bidders the last 20 winners under the ended auction history page, there are items that have generated over 2k bids.

Bidsson turns to network marketing to expand their penny auction business.

When looking further at Bidify.com it appears that this company is using a model of marketing similar to a multilevel/affiliate system.

According to the Biddson/Bidify marketing presentation found on the Bidify.com site,

“Bidify is managed by Larus Palmi Magnusson of Iceland. Bidsson is a penny auction available to the global market.
And, “Bidify and Bidsson are privately held corporations, owned by several entrepreneurs from different parts of the world.”

“In Bidify every-day people can qualify for leadership bonuses based on their performance. The leadership bonus can be up to 50% of the daily net-profits from bidding and purchases made by retail customers through the Bidsson auctions. Bidify affiliates have access to their leadership bonus report from their Bidify affiliate online source. When your sample bids are used by a retail customer, you earn bonus points. The bonus points are added to your bonus point balance.”
A 20 Euro monthly administrative cost is required to keep one’s affiliate account in “good standing” and a monthly personal volume of 50 Euros is the minimum required amount, this means an affiliate/marketer must spend €50 each month to even promote in hopes of generating commission from this company.

“There are bonus “tiers” that yield product sales bonuses. A minimum of 50 “pv” must be maintained monthly and 300 Euros in group sales volume.”

“In Bidify there are six different ways of earning cash rewards.

Retail Bid package purchases made on Bidsson.com by your personally referred customers.
Personally referred affiliate’s sample bid purchases through Bidify.
Downline affiliate’s sample bid purchases through Bidify.
Personal sample bid purchases, once they are given away to customers of Bidsson.
One-Time bonus on personally sponsored and downline affiliate’s subscription purchases.
Monthly bonuses on personally sponsored and downline affiliates monthly subscriptions.

One-Time Bonus is paid out on every affiliate subscription package sold. There are two different ways you can earn a One-Time bonus. Personally referred subscription package sale and Downline subscription package sale 15 levels deep”-http://www.businessforhome.org/2012/04/bidify-review-2012/.

bidify

Bidify, the MLM marketing site for Bidsson has over 22k likes on their Facebook page, over 11k likes on their Facebook status update about a previous cruise ship auction. Bidsson’s Facebook has over 11k likes and highlights the world’s most expensive car at $2.4 million, the Bugatti Veyron Super Sports in their cover image:

Wow!

Bidsson currently has no Twitter followers.

Other penny auction sites that promote their model via a MLM model are Zeekler and DubLi.

Is Bidify/Bidsson legit? What’s your opinion of this site and its business model?

Have You Bid Against DoucheBagJ on a New Audi, Escalade, or Suzuki on SmartBidderz.com?: SmartBidderz.com Review Part 1

Amanda Lee 9 comments

Update 7/4/2012: Visit our latest posting which highlights what our awesome commentator Marcus found: Alleged proof of the below YouTube testimonial being a shilled, paid testimonial and more!

SmartBidderz.com is a penny auction site that is now advertising on Google Adwords. The site’s domain name, less than one month old, was registered on June 11th, 2012.

Upon first glance I found it really quite odd that they are offering so many items all ending at the same time. I find it exceedingly odd that they are offering not only one $65k 2012 Audi, but two, a 2012 Cadillac Escalade, two Louis Vuitton handbags, Suzuki motorcycle, Toshiba laptop, a Nikon D7000, a four night cruise to the Bahamas $2k Canon EOS 7D and tons of other items. In fact, they have over 100 items ending within the next 50 seconds!

You can’t even bid on any of the items on the full page auction page, when clicking on the item to see more details a file downloads to your computer:

Again, all of these items are ending right now and all of these items are being bid on heavily by a HUGE number of bidders. Bidders on SmartBidderz have names like: daytraderjoe, CaliGirl1985, JohnnyBoi, screwebbay, TheeOnly1, MichaelBurton, douchebagj, weselllaptops, babyburton69, soccarmom35, goodgirl, 941boss, MarylandCutoe, jessejames21, TopDownTeddy and tons more.

Question for SmartBidderz.com Founder:

So SmartBidderz, are you running a scam operation with fake items that you never plan to deliver and fake bidder bots that are bidding against ANYONE who finds you and buys bids to bid?

If so, WHY?!

I did just send them an e-mail asking how they decide to offer so many of their items. They appear to accept PayPal and major credit cards for payment.

SmartBidderz only has 1 like on Facebook.

They say they’re “Better than eBay:”

SmartBidderz.com is registered to Sherina Barnes of San Diego, California. The site is hosted on Bluehost on the server IP Address: 69.195.111.108

Registrant:

Sherina Barnes
18736 Caminito Cantilena
San Diego, California 92128
United States

sherinabarnes@gmail.com

Do they even have enough traffic to sustain the thousands of dollars in merchandise that includes 3 cars, 2 identical, and one Suzuki motorcycle ending and being bid on within the next 50 seconds?

Oh yeah, SmartBidderz.com’s Alexa ranking is a whopping 10 MILLION - ”There are 10,002,843 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Smartbidderz.com.”

Here’s a testimonial they posted on YouTube, which was published to Youtube by the company, said he won an iPad and saved a ton of money, didn’t even know what an iPad cost originally and didn’t have the item in hand, said his wife probably had it. He even said that their items appeared to be “priced less” uh, does he even know what a penny auction is? Items are not priced in penny auctions, items are bid on and each bid placed costs money.

Transcribed:

“Hey folks, George William here wanting to send you a video thank you instead of another email to…tell you, uh, in a more personal way how seriously I appreciate your website, Smartbidderz with a Z .com. The The THe. Well. let me start at the beginning. I had always wanted to do some online auctions so I went to uh your site also went to QuiBids.com (pronounced Q Bids) and uh, the stuff at your site is, you know, it appears to be higher quality things, it appears to be priced less and I can buy them at a much lower priced. I had actually. *Looks around.* I don’t. *grabs iPhone from desk – shows it* Well I’ve got my iPhone with me but thats not what I’m looking for, I’m looking for my iPad, I guess my Wife has it. We won the iPad and it shipped quickly and um *Shrugs* it was a, we saved a ton of money. And what’s an iPad now? Like $600 or something, I don’t know, but we got ours for less than $200 at your auction. How great is that, and uh great site. I just wanted to tell you how much I love the site. I go there everyday to check your auctions. HA! I’m goinna win everything!” 6 views on the video thus far, before I watched it that is.

REALLY?

SmartBidderz is even advertising a job and hiring”Work from Home” marketers right now on indeed.com:

“This is a wonderful opportunity for stay at home moms/dads, students, unemployed talent or anyone with a huge circle of influence. Top marketing reps are making over $1,000 per week…”

“Savings of up to 95% on brand new, brand named and popular products. (Such as iPads, Cameras, Cars, Computers and much more)
They can earn free bids through our referral program.
Smart Bidderz is a fair and honest penny auction site with no complaint reports.
Products are direct from the manufacturer. Unlike eBay, consumers are at risk of purchasing used, refurbished or replicated products.”

SmartBidderz.com even “guarantees” that bidders will “Save 90% Off All Products” “As Seen On TV?” Have you seen their penny auctions on TV?

The penny auction software script that SmartBidderz.com runs on is the PhpPennyAuction.com software that we’ve found in the past to offer the robot bidding/shill bidding capabilities. Read more about PhpPennyAuction’s script and see screenshots of the fake bidder function. See: http://www.pennyauctionwatch.com/2010/03/penny-auctions-do-they-shill-bid/

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