Atomic Playboy

So I got an unsolicited email invitation from some Maria that I’ve never heard of for an auction site called MrSvensson, that I won’t deign with a link.

I’ve seen this sort of semi-scammy deal before. Sure, they have auctions. Sure, people win them and get the item. But the entire auction method is completely stacked.

When you bid on an auction, it goes up by 0.10 SEK (about 0.012 USD, or 1.2 cents). However, you must first buy bids before you can place them.

You can either pay per bid on your phone bill for extortionate sums that MrSvensson blames on the phone carriers (which I totally believe), or buy bid packages with 10 to 50 bids. It starts with 10 bids for 149 SEK (14.90 each) to 50 bids for 3849 SEK (7.70 SEK each). A bid via cell phone costs 20 SEK per bid.

The big scammy profit for MrSvensson is that you pay them to bid even if you don’t win. You bid on something, the cost of that auction goes up by 0.10 SEK, and you’re down one of your paid bids. If someone places a new bid, it goes up by another 0.10 SEK and you’re both not winning the auction and paying them for that lost bid.

Granted, they do have a “cashback” deal where the second and third highest bidders (as in most bids placed) get a certain amount of bids back, probably to instill a sense of not actually throwing your bids away, while at the same time encouraging you to place more bids.

On their “Lucky winners” page we get a few examples. Someone won a bid on a vacuum cleaner for 25 SEK. That means with bid increases of 0.10 SEK there were a total of 250 bids on it.

Let’s assume that most people go for packages and buy 20 bids at a time. That gives 12.45 SEK per bid. With 250 bids, that’s a total of 3112.50 SEK for that vacuum cleaner.

Did the vacuum cleaner cost that much for MrSvensson? I doubt it. So there’s one person that got a vacuum cleaner for the extremely low price of 25 SEK (about 3 dollars), and the rest of the bidders essentially threw their money straight at MrSvensson.

Another example: a digital camera won for 122.70 SEK. That makes 1227 bids for a total of 15276.15 SEK or 1860 USD in bid fees. It looks like some semi-decent compact camera that I very much doubt costs more than 500 dollars.

Playstation 3 for 216.40 SEK (26 USD)? That netted 26941.80 SEK (3280 USD) in bid fees.

Is this a legal business method? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. It probably is. But I still see it as just a step above scams. There is nothing whatsoever preventing mysterious users run by the people behind the site to place snipe bids on auctions so they don’t sell too soon in case the item isn’t profitable via the bid fees yet.