Swoopo seems like a regular auction site when you join. First ripoff hint: you have to buy bidz BEFORE actually bidding. They tell you to use your bidz wisely, but they don't explicitely explain why. Reason? Because you lose all your money after a certain amount of bidding clicks and you don't win the auction, OF COURSE! I contacted them to ask if I would get refunded the money I did not bid, and they just gave me a ticket number. Of course they are still sending me emails telling me I can bid 7 times for free if I'm the second runner up when an auction ends, but no word on my lost money. This is not a regular auction like the ones on other very popular web sites, where if you don't win you don't lose any money. This is a REAL rip off, where people are mislead in so many ways. Another hint: watch the bids: when you are getting close to the bid's end, these other bidders start bidding strong against you, and the screen names on the most popular bids are very similar and usually those are the winners. I did not use that much money, I bought 50 bids for $37.50. I was under the understanding that if I didn't win, I would be able to bid on some other item. Nothing farthest from reality, I used my 50 clicks and my money was GONE! I am not a gambler nor have I ever been in a casino, but I have seen movies and this website seems to operate similarly to playing black jack or roulette or some of those other games. You bet, you don't win, you lose your money. That is the way they should explain it in the terms and conditions, so people are truly warned that's the way it works. Of course they get you when you click you accept the ( misleading) terms and conditions. That is how they cover themselves. There should be a great warning about this site, especially because it does not operate like a regular auction site, mainly because it's NOT an auction site, it a GAMBLING site.

It appears that those of us who made it a mission to close down this scam have been successful. It has been down for about a month, and it looks permanent. It should be. These are the worst of the scammers, with the worst fellow bidders in the universe - mean, nasty people with obnoxious screen names who have nothing else to do but push overbidding (we've always suspected these are bots - inhouse shills bidding you up). Stay far away. We hope it never lives again!!!

For the so many like myself who got suckered by this scam, you may want to express your displeasure in person or through your local small claims court as I did. <Swoopo.com> allegedly is a DBA name of: "Entertainment Shopping, Inc.", 800 West El Camino Real, Ste #200, Mountain View, CA 94040.
Google Earth will map it out with entrances to the building shown.
The company uses no letterhead with <swoopo.com> . The key is the parent corporation and state business records that require names and addresses of all corporate officers. Other corporate addresses may apply, but once you ID the officers you can easily use other means to secure your loss if they default in court and an asset seizure is authorized by your local court. Follow the trail. Once you have the officers names check DMV records for license issued to those people . No use checking car registrations since they would
likely be leased. <Swoopo.com> if you reading this - you scammed the wrong guy!

While it looks good, I'd avoid the temptation to use Swoopo. The business model is clever (genius in fact) and as much as I'd like to believe the site was on the up-and-up, there is just no way... I feel scammed rather than simply outbid by more aggressive buyers. I will not use this site again and suspect this company will face problems.

As so many others have written here, this site is a complete fraud, a scam, the makers of the site are complete con artists. SOme major things that point to this site being fraudulent:

1. When you look at past auctions, it shows items have sold for ridiculously low prices, but as soon as you watch an auction or bid on one, the item jumps to ridiculously high prices.
2. The site seems to have unlimited viewers and bidders at all times of the day and night, 24/7, something quite impossible for any website, which points to robotically generated bidders by Swoopo themselves to bid up prices.
3. You can enter an auction and see that there have been only 3 bidders till then, but the moment you put a bid in, the amount of bidders suddenly jumps up to 15 or 20.
4. However hard you bid, and however many times you bid, there is always some other bidder who will bid higher - which points to swoopo generating bids themselves to avoid selling the product, while in the mean time eating up the 60 cents per bid that actual people have paid for and are using up.
5. If you put in a bunch of bid butlers, they are all virtually instantly used up when miraculously many others have suddenty also put in bid butlers at the same time as you.
6. I have not heard or seen of anyone - whether online or on tv or in a magazine - talking about their bargain win on swoopo - which points to the fact there there probably are no real winners, and possibly even no real products that are being auctioned. If there are any real winners out there, who have won an auction, and received their product as promised, I would love to hear from them.
7. Whatever time of day or night you enter the home page, you are miraculously arriving at the beginning stages of an auction, whereas if this was a real and genuine auction, then there should be times when you would be arriving at a part of the auction where the prices have been bid up and are close to ending.
8. If the clock is counting down to zero, and you start bidding, there are suddenly multiple single or bid butler bids, and the time of the auction jumps up back to 20 minutes, 30, or even 50 minutes - which for most people means they will not be sitting there waiting for that long to bid again. All of this is pointing to swoopo having set up the site in a way to do whatever it can to on the one hand, make people bid as much as possible to use up there prepaid for bids at 60 cents a pop and on the other hand, make sure no real person ever wins any item, because there probably are no items to be won in the first place.

There's plenty more I could say, but this stuff should be enough. I hope that the authorities will soon be on the backs of Swoopo and close down the Scam site as soon as possible, before those con artists have sucked millions of dollars out of innocent people.