BEEZID Warning

I saw a commercial for a new "online auction" website called BEEEZID. It aroused my curiosity, so i checked it out.

On the surface (and to those who are always looking to get something for nothing), it seemed promising: every item, even cars, begin at $0.00, and each bid only ups it by a penny. You could end up getting an item for pennies on the dollar, as they advertise cars being sold for just a few hundred dollars - or so it seems.

Yes, you can possibly get a $20,000 vehicle for a few hundred bucks. But there is a catch - a very expensive one. You see, you must buy "bids". You get (15) one cent bids for $15, so each bid costs $1.00. In order to get a car for, say, $500, would require that bidders, collectively, buy and use 50,000 one cent bids - for which BEEZID collected up to $50,000. So, while the winning bidder may get the car for $500, he must be the LAST person to bid.

Therein lay other problems. First, it is unlikely that other bidders will let it go to you for $500 - not when they could buy another bid for a buck - and the price keeps going up until all bidders have bought all the bids they can afford.

Second, every time someone bids, it resets the timer - which can be set for 24 hours or more. There is no limit to how many times the timer can be reset because there is no limit on the number of bids that can be placed. IF you happen to be the last bidder and the timer times out, you win.

It's a lot like musical chairs that could take weeks to play out - but even more like a Ponzi scheme.

In short, if BEEZID sells a $20,000 car for $500, they actually make about $30,500 profit on that $20,000 car because they solf 50,000 bids and got the $500 winning price to boot.

If you decide to get involved in the hopes of "winning" something great, at least now you have been warned. But do yourself a favor - place only one or two bids on an item over the course of the auction. If you get lucky and win, you come out ahead. If not, you only lost a couple bucks.

Make no mistake - BEEZID is not so much an auction site as it is a lottery - and your chances of winning are no better than in any other lottery.

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