Penny Auctions: Don’t Be Cheated!
Nobody wants to be cheated on, deceived, scammed, swindled or whatever you want to call it. Well that’s exactly what many phony penny auction sites are doing today – rip you off your hard-earned money. It’s sad to say that as penny auction sites continue to double in number due to market competition, sites operating fraudulently are on the rise as well. Honest site owners demonstrate their site’s authenticity by being more transparent. This honest effort is however equaled on the other end by deceptive and opportunistic site owners who have been exercising a modus operandi to trick unsuspecting bidders out of their pockets. Below are the most common tactics fake penny auction sites employ.
Bidding bots. Such unethical move uses automated bot bidders built in to a site’s system set up to deploy fake bids using dummy user accounts. When you join in on a site using such technique, it would appear as if you are bidding against another person.
Shill bidding. “Shill”, by definition, means “one who acts as a decoy”. From this we can figure out what these phony sites do. Penny auction owners themselves and their families, friends or employees join in the bidding process thus ultimately increasing the final price of an item. Not only that, it also extends the auction time for other legit players to place more bids thinking they’re caught up in a bidding war.
Credit and debit card scam. One nice strategy to get free bids and have a good chance of winning a penny auction item is to register and play on newly launched sites. However, there is a higher possibility that these sites could be fraudulent due to the lack of history upon which you could base their legitimacy. Upon registration, some of these sites ask for your credit card information for God-knows-what scam they’re cooking. To be more secured about your financial information, use sites that allow their users to use Paypal.
Failure to deliver. With people not having to pay a hefty cost and go through much complexity in launching a penny auction site, many and many are getting into this online venture – good few of them being nothing but hoaxes. Some sites may not be using bidding bots or practicing shill bidding but they don’t ship the items won after collecting all the participant’s bid payments.
Doesn’t reimburse bidders for losing bids. Although non-reimbursement of losing bids does not directly make a site fraudulent, sites that don’t disclose information on what happens to these bids are “gracefully” trying to defraud their clients. Trustworthy penny auction sites pay off losing players by crediting the bids they lost on items they didn’t win and placing them on items they want to purchase instead. Good customer service is always a sign of trustworthiness.
Commendable penny auction sites
Notwithstanding the different scam techniques used by some penny auction sites, there are still a great many that make use of ethical business practices – those that provide impressive customer service. Before purchasing bids on a particular site, first do some researching. Check out their regulations, study the features and read the terms of agreement. Browsing the web for penny auction tools and guides will also help you select the best apple from the bunch and therefore eliminate your chance of being a prey for phony penny auction predators.