BidFun

Well, it is clear that there are also planted bidders there, doing most of the bidding. One can see quite clearly on some auctions that one bidder constantly outbids itself. Bear in mind that
A] The planted bidders make no money for the site
B] They must make a profit on each item they sell, and thus the logic must exist for that to be the case

Now if many people were legitimately bidding, the maths above in many examples would be correct, but given that the large percentage of bids are clearly made by plants, they are not making significant amounts on each item. Presumably, once the price gets too high, if not enough bids have been taken to make the item profitable to sell at that price, then they let one of their plants win.

Take an example:
A Sony PSP Go! Console retail £250.
Obviously they want some margin, and to pay for the 'free' shipping. Let's imagine that they decide the amount they wish to make for the item is £500. As each bid is worth roughly 50p (down to 40p for discounts). That means the number of bids required to pay for the item is 1000 - raising the item price by £10. Clearly if it were just you and a plant bidding, at one bid each, this would mean a winning bid price of £20, at which point you'd have spent £500, plus the cost of the item - another £20. However, if there are more legitimate bidders, for example 2 bidders, then you could perhaps win the auction after having spent only £250 on bidding - presuming the other legitimate bidder has also spent £250. With 10 legitimate bidders, you might actually win the item having spent only £50 on bids, plus e.g. £20 final price.

So ultimately, it all depends on how many legitimate bidders are placing bids. Believe that if you are bidding against plants - it will end up costing you a lot. If you are bidding against other people, you might get it cheaper.

Be afraid. Be very afraid! This is an extremely clever way for BidFun to make shed loads of money at your expense. I myself was just about drawn in until I analysed the figures and, more importantly, the tactics.

Granted, the percentages that they show people have saved, are very impressive, but BidFun conveniently don't show you what they themselves have actually made from an item. I'll give you an example.

The percentages that the winning bidders save look impressively high. The lowest actual percentage saving that I found was a healthy looking 40%. That's still a good bit less than the RRP, you would say.

That particular item had an RRP of £180.00. The winning bid was £107.91, making a saving of £72.09 for the "lucky" bidder, but here's the catch. Each bid only increases the selling price by 1 penny so, to achieve a winning bid of £107.91, there has to be 10,791 bids. The price that you pay for each individual bid ranges from between 40 to 50 pence. This depends on the block of prepaid bids that you buy. Even using the lowest of 40 pence a bid for this example, the minimum money BidFun made from the bidding alone on this item was £4,316.40. Added together with the £107.91 that they made from the actual winning bid, makes a grand total of £4,424.31. Not bad for an item that has an RRP of £180.00.

But wait, the really clever part is how they achieve a high number of bids. The clock continually counts down towards the end of the auction but as each bid is made, an extra 20 seconds is added to the clock. Even when the clock reaches, what you would think to be, the end the auction, it may not be, and normally isn't, finished. It then goes into, what BidFun call, "checking" mode. This, as they claim, is because their clocks are waiting for further information from their servers, to see if there are any new bids that have been recorded before the auction ended. If there are, then these are displayed, together with an update of the countdown timer. This update can add seconds, minutes or hours to an auction. So, effectively the auction doesn't finish when you actually expect it to. In fact, it can go on for hours more with more and more money being poured into BidFun's pockets.

Don't do it people! If you are still not convinced, then do a little calculation for yourself. Take a look at any item from the "finished auctions" section. Break the winning bid down into pence, multiply it by 0.4 and you have the minimum money that bidders have spent on bids alone. Try it, it's frightening!

Now, if after that you still feel like having a go, then you fully deserve to be taken for all that you have. Remember the saying, "If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is."

I have been watching bidfun for a week. I bought $20.00 worth of bid credits every time you bid it costs you a dollar. That I don't have a problem with. The problem I have is you never have a real chance to win. In the weeks time I have been watching them the same users get on and bid over and over again to drive the prices up. Matte, 84angela, church1of, pupuce66, hotrod66, Herculxena, Vortex897, Peter *******, Gil13, Jomg, Marco*******, Titanik, bouriquette26, wastingbid. 4, chonchonchon, VSwifey, Hotcougar1, je. Vais. Jusqu, Risquetout, Monettemonique, laloge, miamiprincess, pbart77, chinaman, bluiiiz, kokoro. Also if you look up their nz, uk, au, and usa sites its the exact same auctions with the exact same people bidding on the items with the exact same number of users on. If this site was legitimate then they wouldnt have fake people bidding and running the prices up. I sat and watched one bidder bid on 20 bidfun credits and spent well over $50.00 for it why would anyone in their right mind spend that kind of money for something that would only cost them $20.00 for. For anyone that uses this site or goes and looks at it beware.! You will not win. They have it set up so that you wont. Go look at the finished auction. The same people everyday are winning.

Bidfun is not a scam, as far as I can tell. They state very clearly how the bidding works, the cost of "tokens" to bid, and the fact that tokens are non-refundable. It took me less than 30 seconds to figure out how they made their profit on their items, and I think it is genius for the owners. Basically consider it a raffle. You buy a raffle ticket for a chance to win, but you are not guaranteed you will be the winner. People don't call raffles scams or frauds when they don't win. Think of casinos with slot machines. Noone guarantees you'll win on those either, but people plunk in credit after credit for the chance to win. I don't see how this is different.

I have looked around the web and mostly I see people screaming scam who have either not read the terms of using the site correctly and then lost a bid and couldn't get their bid tokens refunded, or people who never tried it who object to the way the site makes money. The one thing I have not come across is a genuine winner of a bid stating they recieved their product. I understand they (bidfun's owners) make an obscene amount of money on each item they sell thru the bids placed, and to me that actually makes it more believable that I could actually recieve a PS3 for under $60, because I understand how they make their money and see no reason for them to scam the winners, and every reason to fulfill their contract by delivering the product promised so people will continue to bid and not sue their pants off.

But caveat emptor (buyer beware). Read the site, understand how it works, and decide if you want to spent the money for the opportunity to win something at a fraction of retail when it is more likely you will lose your tokens and not win anything at all. Just like lottery or raffles, you pay to play with no guarantee of winning. I chose not to play.

I agree with all of the previous posters, this is a legitimate scam that makes a massive amount of money for the owners.
However I actually managed to make it work for me.
Here's how:
Paid entry fee £10 for 20 credits. Watch carefully and bid on an 'auction' for Bidfun credits which is open only for new punters. Let it run for a while and then bid when it reaches ~10-20% of its value. In my case I bidded at £8.00 for 400 bidfun credits and won at about £8.50.
So now I have net 415 credits and I paid £18.50 (£10 + £8.50) for them
I actually wanted a memory stick. So when one came up I put an automatic robot bid in. I was prepared to offer 25 credits as this would now cost me <~£2.50.
Bidding starts but people quickly got scarred off by the my Robot bidding. So I win at a cost of 7 credits and a winning price of 32p. So I got a £40 item for 70p (7 credits)plus 32p = £1.02p. Which they delivered.
Or looking at it differently I have a £40 item and I have paid Bidfun <£20 for it!. Plus I still have >400 credits which I can afford to waste.
I certainly will not be buying any more credits from Bidfun as I can see that it is a very doggy site and my gain has been at the cost of many other innocent people... which does not sit well.
It would not surpraise my if many of the big bidders on this site are real people who have worked out how to make it work for them... like me! And are making money from it as you don't have to take the item that you win, instead you can take Paypal credits, Amazon gift vouchers or more Bidfun credits.
This way of making money is morally disgusting as it prays on the innocent and gullible. I for one will not particapate in the scam. I am lucky and got away unscathed and would recommend you do too!

A scam because all the bidders are Robots created to automatically outbid any possible real bidder. I have proof that it is a scam. If you compare two or more bidfun sites together at any time e.g. I compared the. co.uk and. Com and com.au sites:

- The same Usernames appear for all the Live and Finished auctions
- The Robots use "Automatic" and "Manual" bids that make it look like a variety of people are bidding.
- The number of people online is the same for all bidfun websites! Now isn't that a coincidence? It isn't a real count of online users, just a fake display (which changes to convince you that people are logging in and out).
- The times of when the auctions end are the same time (for a Sony PSP):
--07/06/2010 (European date format) 21:07:37 was won by STEFLOV in bidfun.co.uk at GBP 3.69.
--06/07/2010 (American time format) 04:07:37 STEFLOV won the auction at USD 3.69
--08/06/2010 (European date format) 06:07:37 STEFLOV won the auction at AUSD 7.38

- The trail of last bidders are the same names at the same times.
--STEFLOV (Automatic)
--carpiste13 (Manual)
--STEFLOV (Automatic)
--polipo62 (Manual)
--STEFLOV (Automatic)
--boulou123 (Manual)
--STEFLOV (Automatic)
--boulou123 (Manual)
--STEFLOV (Automatic)
--Pureza64

So definitely you will never win. I am going to close my account now! The inventors of such websites are greedy and deceitful.