penny auction sites

Today’s featured article, a guest blog post on the current state of penny auctions and why there’s a big problem, was sent in to us by a penny auction site employee. We couldn’t agree more with the words that are written.

“Anyone involved in the penny auction industry has heard over and over about scams, dishonest site owners, shills, bots, and companies running auctions they have no intentions of fulfilling. What most have not heard however, is the other side of the equation. Dishonesty has no place in this industry and it cannot and should not be tolerated in any form. I would like to shed some light on this topic from a point of view not often published.

While the majority of penny auction users seem to be your average, honest, hard working person, there is a small group of people that have made it their mission to rob, cheat and steal new penny auctions blind. They are experts in this field and will stop at nothing to accomplish their goals and once they are uncovered they implore threats and scare tactics that would raise eyebrows everywhere.

In the last six months I have come to realize the breadth of the brutality and dishonesty of the inner circle of penny auction world. These people know exactly how to work the system and work it well, often leading to the downfall of perfectly legitimate penny auction sites. To add insult to injury they then smear the sites and use their sway in forums and similar places to accomplish this goal. They run in groups, and collusion is normally their first move. Once they have effectively scared off the average bidder, they then rack up auction after auction using different accounts to try to stay under the radar. They hide their IP addresses and even hack in to site in order to make certain they are winning every auction possible. They know it is extremely hard to amass any evidence against them and these cheaters steal thousands of dollars preying on honest small businesses in order to profit themselves.

The irony of the whole thing is that once a site has collected enough evidence to prove they are cheating, they go in to smear mode and blog and post anywhere and everywhere they can about how horrible the site is. What is the site to do? Do you ship the wins to a person who has cheated you and the other users out of thousands of dollars? Do you not ship the wins and deal with charge backs and the smear campaign? This may seem like an easy choice however they have already thought of this too. They generally wait until they have received $10,000-$15,000 worth of product and then do charge backs for every penny spent, effectively leaving them with product that they never paid for. As you can imagine paying out $15,000 nine or ten times over can greatly affect a site getting the legitimate customers wins out in a timely manner.

What these people do is criminal, yet they are the first to make the same claim against the sites they victimize. They befriend the average penny auction user in order to build their credibility so when they speak, people listen. They then use this sway to

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