BidRack
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I originally signed up to be able to access the bidrack bidding site in late April or early May 2011. I did not know when giving my credit card number that I was being charged. I discovered it AFTER using up the bids and not being allowed to continue bidding. I also did not know that I was being charged to buy the right to bid and that each time you bid it costs you one bid to do it, whether you win or not. In any legitimate auction, you are charged only if you win a bid, not for merely making a bid. The entire process of signing up is a scam, as Bidrack knows very well that most people will fall into this without understanding what they are doing.
That is not the end of the story, however. On 28 July 2011, I finally discovered something much more sinister than even the original signup scam. BIDDING BOTS are being used on every item with a retail value above a certain amount, and this is being done in such a way as to prevent legitimate bidders from winning any really nice expensive items.
This came to my attention while I spent bids from a total of 368 down to 190, trying to win only items with listed retail prices of $149 or higher. I began to wonder why, while the timer was being reset to 10 seconds remaining for the auction to expire after any accepted bid, my own bids never fell below 4 or 5 seconds remaining before being overbid, while other bidders were regularly being allowed to fall as far as "Going Twice" before being overbid by another bidder, or actually winning the bid. A pattern soon emerged as I continued to observe. I stopped bidding for a long time with 192 bids remaining to just monitor what was happening when I realized what this pattern represented. Even the bidding process is a scam.
I wrote down the names of the bidders who were allowed to pass through the 4 second [more typically 5 second] barrier and which names finally won the bids, if they ended while I was still observing.
During the hours of 0300 to 0600 PDT two different sets of the same names kept recurring, with one switch to a new series of names after about 0400 hours PDT. While the first set of 7 names was active, at no time did any of these names ever bid against any of the other 6 names in that group, while all other bidder names were consistently overbid at about the 5 seconds remaining timer interval for each item. This represents robotic bidding tactics. Auto bidding can be paid for by any individual, but what I observed represents a potential scam of gigantic proportions, as Bidrack itself must be considered a strong suspect in doing this robotic bidding to prevent any expensive items from ever being actually lost from their inventory. While it is conceivable that some individual might open seven different accounts to do this, and also pay the extra fee to acquire the right to auto bid, which would be exorbitantly expensive to do, this would still not explain why none of the robotic bids ever overbid any of the other autobids. It's even more curious why, suddenly, after one of the suspected robotic names won a long-running bidding battle on the Louis Vitton purse I had spent the majority of my bids trying to win, that the name set changed and a different set of names, now including only the winning auto bidder from the first set, could be observed consistently doing the same kind of overbidding at about the 5 second timeout mark, and again, never overbidding any of the other names that were allowed to pass below that time remaining barrier. The time remaining before any legitimate non-auto bidder was overbid varied only from 4 seconds [rarely] through 5 seconds [overwhelmingly the majority] to 6 seconds [rarely].
I eventually spent two more bids, merely to have the items show up on my bidding history, so I could see, later, who won the items. Of course they were won by the obvious robotic bidders who never competed with each other but always overbid any other bidder who was not making robotically controlled bids.
Bidrack, itself, becomes the chief suspect in doing this kind of bidding, as it would prevent them from losing any of the expensive items, such as the Louis Vitton purse, an Apple Ipad2, or any other items they would prefer not to really allow out of their inventory.
It takes only 15 minutes of your observation time to see the pattern, no matter what series of names happens to be being used at any given hour of the day as the bidbots prevent ordinary and what I would consider legitimate bidders from ever winning a bid, except on junk items which are by far the most common items offered by Bidrack [items below about $100 retail value].
If you read this and see the same tactics being used it would benefit other people to know that I'm not the only one who has observed this practice, which should be used, eventually, in a process to shut down this illegitimate scam operation. I've filed a report with the Interstate Commerce Commission, already, and posted what I've observed on another website, similar to this one, called Pissed Consumers.
I want anyone out there who cares about seeing only legitimate businesses in operation on the internet to be aware of the shenanigans being observed at the Bidrack website. It represents serious fraud, if it is Bidrack, itself, perpetuating the practices I witnessed.