Ok, this website has been mentioned on the forum once before, but not *nearly* in enough detail. I and my partner in crime here at my place of employment have been getting loads of entertainment from this site and I had to share.
Here are the basics. This is an auction site. All of the auctions are for brand new items, usually tech related. The auctions are usually short, like minutes long, though some are hours. On a standard auction the price starts at 15 cents. There is no reserve. That's right, a 73" television on auction for 15 cents with no reserve. Here's the fun part: it costs you to bid. You have to BUY bids beforehand, in increments of at least 30, for 75 cents each. Every time you bid, the price of the item goes up 15 cents. Sounds simple so far, but toward the end of the auction, say the last 20 seconds or so, every time someone bids it resets the clock to 20 seconds.
Let me lay out the economics here, for simplicity's sake. They also have what they call a "penny auction", which is the same as above, but the price starts at 1 cent and each bid raises the price 1 cent. In one auction they sold a Nikon D90 digital SLR camera with a 18-105mm lens kit. Runs $1150 at Newegg. The winner of the auction paid $158.96 for it. Wow! Sounds great. What you don't see at first is that to win that auction he put in 1096 bids. At 75 cents each, that cost him $822. Total he's out: $980. Still a fair deal for him, but when you see the cost that auction ended at, that means that there were 15,895 bids placed total. At 75 cents each. Total income to Swoopo? $11,921.25. Subtract the cost of the camera and they still cleared ten thousand dollars. They could give it away free to the winner and still clear ten grand.
It gets better. They also auction off "free bid vouchers". That's right, you can spend the bids you paid for to bid on more bids that you get for free. *IF* you're the winner. Again, great deal for the winner, even better deal for Swoopo. Bad for everyone else.
These guys are even selling money. I can't find it now, but I saw an auction for 80 dollars in cash. It works exactly like the others, so the winner ends up paying less than $80 for the $80, but Swoopo makes a huge profit and everyone else is just out. "Hey! I know a place where we can buy five hundred dollars for seventy-five cents! Follow me!"
I'm not complaining. I've read a lot of blogs and posts calling this deal a scam but it's not. They are up-front with everything they do. I don't see a lick of dishonesty at all. I say if they can get this many people to throw this much money at them, more power to them. As Larry Niven said, think of it as evolution in action.
Go to the site sometime and just watch the money roll in to these guys. It shows a bunch of the ongoing auctions live and every time a bid is made the price flashes red. That's another 75 cents into these guys' bank accounts. Just look the site over, watch it for a while and see what absolute pure distilled genius it is.