We at MAW were interested to receive an email from one of our faithful followers regarding Madbid (www.madbid.com) the UK based penny auction house.
It appears that a few people had written some negative comments on the Madbid forum http://madbidforums.com/index.php?/topic/95-strange-winners-report/ regarding a few suspicious user names including some comments from a “AuctionWatch” which I will point out right now is not MAW. Madbid went on to say that their data is monitored and they are compliant with Information Commisioners Office (ICO) (which I will assume is a UK regulatory office).
Our follower took it upon himself to write to the ICO and this was their response:
Sent: Mon, 19 July, 2010 9:33:22
Subject: Enquiry reponse from the Information Commissioner’s Office
19 July 2010
Case Reference Number ENQ0319992
Dear Mr Collier
Thank you for your email dated 26 June 2010, attached.
Your enquiry
I understand from your email that you have been informed that the Information Commissioner’s Office keeps a record of all bidders or indeed can monitor any bids on any auctions run by a particular website. This is not the case.
We do not routinely hold information on behalf or public authorities or private companies. Indeed we are unaware of any company called Madbid. I have set out below what this office does.
About the Information Commissioner’s Office
The Information Commissioner is a UK independent supervisory authority reporting directly to the UK Parliament. The Commissioner enforces and oversees the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 within the UK and the Environmental Information Regulations and Freedom of Information Act 2000 within England , Wales and Northern Ireland .
You can find out about your rights as an individual under the legislation we oversee by visiting the section for individuals on our website at http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public.aspx.
Reporting possible scams
If you are concerned that a UK organisation is operating an online scam, you may want to contact the Office of Fair Trading to report the scam and seek advice on your rights as a consumer.
The Office of Fair Trading can be contacted via their website www.oft.gov.uk. There is a list of known scams on their website at http://www.oft.gov.uk/Consumer/Scams/default.htm.
Consumer Direct is a telephone and online consumer advice service, supported by the Office of Fair Trading -
Website: www.consumerdirect.gov.uk
Telephone: 08454 04 05 06.
I hope that this information is helpful. If you have further questions on this issue, please either respond to this email (leaving the subject line unchanged) or contact our helpline on 0303 123 1113.
Yours sincerely
Case Officer
Information Commissioner’s Office
Hmmm. Do you smell the same rat as me here? Its well and good quoting facts but when these quoted facts aren’t entirely truthful why quote them in the first place? I must admit we are becoming more and more sceptical of one or two penny auction websites including Madbid. We did read an article recently where Madbid claimed they had over 70,000 winners and that they have over 100 auctions per day. Well what a pack of lies that it is. The FACT is: MadBid may now have 100 auctions per day (lets all monitor this claim from Madbid) now but certainly from their inception in 2008 this was not the case. In fact during their first 12 months of operation they averaged 43 auctions per day FACT. So lets assume that their second year they had 100 auctions per day (and I would stake my life savings on the fact that this is not the case and that they have now conveniently made a few cosmetic changes to their website to say they have over 100 auctions per day because quite a few people had questioned their claims on the number of winners they have advertised against the actual number of auctions) it still does not add up. Take a look for yourself at their claim http://uk.madbid.com/about/
Lets look at the mathematics. First 12 months of operation August 2008 – August 2009 Average number of auctions 43 per day (even less in the first few months!!!). August 2009 – June 2010 number of auctions 100 per day (and I am being generous with this estimation). Unless I cannot add up that means they had 15695 auctions Aug 08 – Aug 09 and 33000 auctions Sep 09 – June 10 inclusive (includes Christmas Day, New Years Eve Grans Birthday etc.) giving us a grand total of 45,695 auctions since their inception in August 2008. I have a problem with this. You see they claim to have had over 70,000 winners since they started yet they have only ever held a maximum of 45,695 auctions. Dont tell me Madbid that you have had numerous double winners or something!!! They claim these figures on their own website http://uk.madbid.com/about/ yet they are way off the mark.
Perception is a subject that should be treated with kid gloves. I understand that Madbid have had a major financial injection recently and as a result they have been advertising globally it seems through all media channels. DO NOT BE FOOLED. Nothing is straightforward with Madbid or in the responses they give to claims or criticism. One sure fire way of confirming if Madbid are as big and legit as what they claim they are is to take at look at their annual accounts submitted through Companies House in the UK. Even that is not straightforward as I suspect the accounts will not be filed under Madbid but under their Holding Company name. You do the maths yourself based on the average profit they apparently make on each auction and I will bet a dollar right now that the accounts figures (assuming they have been filed lol) will come nowhere near what you and I calculate their T/O to be.
I smell a BIG RAT with Madbid and we at MAW are going to continue our efforts in trying to unearth more ‘scratch your head time’ facts about Madbid and any other scrupulous penny auction websites that may appear on our radar no matter where they are located in the world.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
November 7th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
they are all RIPOFFS first you pay around $150 for membership and you receive 100 bids free—–thats 15.9cents /bid—-every time you place a bid its between 6&20cents times the amount you bid
look at the time it took to win if it took 50 minutes ,thats 3000 seconds at approx 6-20 cents per second,then imagine yoy bid 500 bids to beat someone,if somebody bids 600 bids,you instantly lose 3oo bids times whatever you paid for the 300 bids(average 10cents)—-that means you instantly lose $30 for one shot. if you continue to bid you can lose hundreds of dollars and wind up with NOTHING.
when you see someone winning multiple items ,what he has done is run a business he buys $10000 of bids and every time you bid a high numbe(like 1000 bids+100dollars he immediately out bids you and youre out—–his other game is auto bids—–he places $1000 in auto bids and every time you bid tyat $100( or1000 bids ) you instantly get cancvelled by the auto bidder and you never know how much he put in the auto bidder and how much you need to out bid him. even if you succeed to outbid him,he comes back with more until your broke and he wins.
these auctions are NOT overstock as claimed–thats a lie—-and the auction gets paid more than the cost of the item with your lost money
THE BIGGEST RIP OFF IN HISTORY AND DEFINITELY GAMBLING TO GET YOU HOOKED
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
January 30th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Now I am sick of bully bidders winning all the Auctions. After months of research, study and bidding, I have come to the conclusion that there is no chance for newbie’s to win the big gadgets which they joined Madbid for. For weeks I saw same people bidding for a car from 9:00am to 2:30am every single day. As the bid timer is only 20 sec, this means they don’t and can’t get off their pc’s for weeks non stop, unbelievable. Furthermore no point even trying to bid on anything like that or any other amazing gadgets.
I think there should be a limit set for bidding or winning in a month and give others a chance of winning. The more members to the site the more the costs will go up and the less chance for beginners. My advice is only join if you have plenty of money to throw away and got plenty of time to stay on your pc. For most like me who don’t have both of these, its basically impossible to win and you will just waste all your bids and most importantly you‘re money. To avoid the “bidding war” people have started bidding another way known as “snipe” or “sniping”.
After loosing money myself I thought I’ll have to somehow make it all back and come up with a system that makes everything easy, which wastes no bids(money) and time. So finally after weeks I have come up with a tool that will bid for you without you being there, similar to eBay Auction Sniper but this one specially for Madbid. Not only that, it will also only bid when the timer has reached below 1 second but before it reaches 0, dramatically increasing your chance of winning. So basically you will loose no unnecessary bids and will only bid when someone is about to win an item. Go ahead watch others compete against each other for hours whiles wasting bids after bids and as soon as one of them is about to win you’re bid becomes active. 100% guarantee you will save on bids and most defiantly raise you’re chances of winning, not only that you don’t even have to be next to your pc for hours.
I wont be reading any replies on here so if you want further advice and want information on how to set it up please email me at biddershelp@hotmail.co.uk. As I am receiving plenty of emails at the moment I mite take time to reply but don’t worry I will reply to all. Please no time wasters.
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
November 21st, 2011 at 4:49 am
My first post
Like or Dislike:
0 
0