Swoopo: The Con Is On

Recently it’s been de rigeur for newspapers to publish credit-crunch beating tips. You know the sort of thing: “Why not make your own chocolate cakes for Birthdays?”, the writer rhetorically asks. Adding that all we need do is “Simply buy some Green & Blacks bars and some Tesco Finest Almonds and follow this recipe“. I’ll tell you why not. Because your DIY, Blue Peter-style approach to saving money actually costs more than buying something sticky and lovely from high-end bakers Patisserie Valerie.

Anyway,in this spirit of debunking the Ivory Tower-ed mend and make do mentality, we move seamlessly onto a site called Swoopo.co.uk. This touts itself as an auction site which offers users the chance to buy sought-after electrical goods, such as Nintendo Wiis, PCs and laptops, for a fraction of the high street cost. Sounds too good to be true? My, my you’re a smart one. That’s because it is.

Swoopo.co.uk works by users buying the right to bid on an item, with each bid priced at 40 pence and increasing the cost of the lot by eight pence. Each bid then adds a further 20 seconds or so to the auction time. If you’re lucky enough to be the person placing the final bid you win the right to buy the lot at the final price. The cash accrued by the site from the process means that they receive many times what they paid for the item and enables them to sell the item at discounts of up to 70 per cent. Thus, we’re led to believe, the buyer gets a bargain.

Indeed, some testimonies from users bear out that cheap goods can be secured in this way. However, judging by the majority of reports on message boards what is happening more often is that bidders very rarely get win items and are spending vast sums of money on bids only to come away with nada.

That’s because they are in effect gambling, with the likelihood of winning being determined by lottery-style chance. You're unable to see how many other people are bidding, so are throwing money into the web ether blindly. If you’ve any sense you’ll give Swoopo the widest of wide berths.