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/
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See why bidray is a scam. Even if you are the highest bidder the bot will still win.

Update : Tdbids.net is back live now. They have resolved server issue..

Update : Tdbids.net is down since morning. they have 541 error message on their homepage. We have been told by their admin that website will be up and running soon..

We are receiving complaints about website Tdbids.net. Users are saying that they use Auto Bidders and they do not ship items to winners. we will be reviewing their software and will keep you updated.

In the mean time if you have faced any problem with that website, feel free to tell us and other users. You can start a thread in form to discuss it or comment this post.

I have been asked to review Beezid website.

Beezid is a nice looking clean website. They have used Nice colors for website(Something like swoopo).
The website is hosted on dedicated server and server is Located in Broomfield US. Their Domain is under proxy. The website is developed by using PHP language like many other websites. Their software looks unique as I have not seen any website using that software yet. So it looks like their custom made software with Great features.

Their response time is very fast and even Response size is very small which makes it a very fast website for bidding. you can bid in last seconds. You can try their Mega view to list all of their auctions at one page. But I suggest not to use that when you are bidding. Reason is , more auctions on a webpage will increase page response size so it will be slow to bid.

I like their Drag Drop function to rearrange auctions. using that feature you can arrange your favorite auctions in line so that you don’t have to look for them on auction page.

They have implemented SSL on pages where it is required which is good. you can relax as your data will be encrypted before it is passed to server. so even using network sniffers, it will be hard to check what information you are passing to server.

They have nice variety of auctions. Overall website is good and worth trying. there are couple of suggestions to Beezid..

1. If they could implement Live chat(shoutbox) on each auction so that user can communicate with each other, that will be great. users will feel safe that they are not bidding against Auto Bidders.
2. Show who is online on public pages with GEO information.

These features should be there on all auction websites.

If you have tried that website you can share your experience in our forum.

Note: Now you can discuss your views about Beezid.com in our forum. Feel free to join and start your own topic.

Another new recruit to the United Kingdom penny auction market in recent months is plbid.co.uk

For the last couple of months I have been trying to write a review about plbid.co.uk. However it seems they have problems because for the third time in as many months the website has been ‘temporarily’ closed the latest being for security reasons whatever that entails!

We will keep our eye on plbid.co.uk and when they get a few months under their belt without a significant closure of their website we can perhaps put a worthwhile review on line.

One of the latest penny auction websites to hit the United Kingdom is Bidyell.com

Some of the graphics used on the site are okay which probably stems from the fact that BidYell is part of T-Enterprise a Scottish Games Design & Development Company although I must say considering their forte in hindsight I am probably a little disappointed in the appearance of the website or maybe it’s just another one of those off-the-shelf penny auction websites from our friends at Sonik Technologies that we featured recently.

Regardless of appearance the website itself is very easy to navigate around and seems to have a few innovative ideas like the ‘Knockout Auction’ which seems like a great idea although I personally being a lightweight boxer would not want to find myself up against a Super Heavyweight with his massive arsenal of bids if you get my drift.

The website is relatively new so it is hard to gauge feedback although BidYell does have a forum which attracts transparency and gets the big thumbs up from us. There were a few negative comments in the forum about shipping times but hey I am sure that will be sorted in due course.

On to the technical aspects of the website. I discovered that the website is quite slow and counters are not smooth enough. There is a very good reason for this in that every second the website sends a request of about 20 – 30 KB to its server which updates the clock counter and other stuff on website. The size of request is way too big if you compare it with other websites like Swoopo (1KB), Madbid(1-2 KB), Redbread (1-2 KB). so you could say that this websites bandwidth requirements are 15 – 30 times greater compared to other websites. This website sends data of about 2-3 MB per minute which is HUGE

Has anyone tried this website in FireFox? I tried it on 2-3 different computers and sometimes the website did strange things in Firefox. If anyone else has experienced problems in Firefox we would love to hear from you. The website also has a few JavaScript errors which can affect bidding. Please check the screenshot below.

Share your experiences with this website here.

Continuing on from my last post regarding penny auction website software ….

I decided to continue my research to try and ascertain what organizations are using the software provided by Sonik Technologies (as featured in my last post). The first website we are going to feature in this series is GoCrazyBid.com.

If you check WHOIS data and search for gocrazybid you will find, by huge coincidence, that the registration service is provided by Sonik Technologies PVT. Contact: +91.9928988554” . This is the very same Indian company that we featured yesterday who sell software containing dummy bidders.

You may recall that from the chatroom transcriptions they stated that all of their penny auction software has Dummy Bidders(Robots). I think there is justification is stating that GoCrazyBid also have this Dummy Bidder option within their admin panel.

Whether GoCrazyBid use this function or not is difficult to prove we but we know for definite that they have the Dummy Bidder option contained within their software. So bidders beware, it may not be just Jon from Houston or Steve from London that you are bidding against but also Rob Ot from Sonik Technologies too. Do take a minute to check the following screenshots….

To discuss more about GoCrazyBids, join MAW Community.

It goes without saying that the Penny Auction industry is one that is growing at an alarming rate with websites seemingly appearing on the scene on a daily basis. To maintain transparency it is surely time now that an official global regulatory body is set up to set the parameters on which all penny auction websites should operate with transparency, diligence and morality the key words that spring to mind.

We have carried out independent reviews on some websites the findings of which can be found here. In addition we have been digging a little deeper into where some penny auction websites emanate from and the functionalities of each.

My findings were both horrifying and if I am honest very worrying indeed.

My research concentrated on how penny auction websites are developed, the software used and what it takes for a successful penny auction website to be developed.
My first and only port of call to date was to a software development company based in India called Sonik Technologies who amongst other things claim to be specialists in Web Development, Web Design, Internet Marketing and Games Development, please note the last offering as this has relevance to this article. Many pundits have claimed that penny auction websites are a lottery, a gamble, a game, where there are winners but a bucket load of losers too. There are certain penny auction websites that have been attracting bad press after bad press mainly by disillusioned ‘players’ who can never seem to win anything no matter how much they spend. You see not only has MyAuctionWebsite copied the online conversation with Sonik Technologies regarding their penny auction websites but we have also kindly been given access to the Administration Panel of their auction websites, the very same applications developed for a number of US and UK penny auction websites. If you look closely at their templates http://www.soniktechnologies.in/auction.html you may notice one or two familiar names.

Click here to look at our online conversation with soniktechnologies

Mmmmm. Disturbing I am sure you will agree. Moving on, I mentioned earlier that we were also given access to the admin panel used by so many penny auction websites. I will leave it to your own imagination what “Dummy Bids” mean and Dummy End Price. Take a look for yourself I think you will find it quite interesting.

In summary, I do believe there are penny auction websites out there who have worked very hard to get where they are today and in this list I would include the likes of Swoopo, Redbread and Madbid but hasten to add there are also a lot scrupulous website owners who are cheating their customers out of hard earned cash with these fraudulent autobid systems where it is impossible for bidders to actually win unless of course the site owners want them to win. These are scandalous findings and the websites responsible for running their business in this manner should be brought to justice immediately to save the integrity and names of all the honest and ethically run penny auction websites out there.

I will list all the websites using that software in my next blogs.

Your comments would be welcomed.

Biddango.com is a new penny auction website with a nice and clean design (still needs Browser compatibility).

biddango review

This website is hosted on Dedicated server. I wonder why they hide their identity using proxy server while registering their domain name.
This website is new and does not offer much variety of auctions. they have 4-5 live auctions but I expect more in the near future. They do not have SSL implemented on their website like Swoopo, redbread and madbid. But in their Privacy Policy, they have mentioned that :

“We offer the use of a secure server. All supplied sensitive/credit information is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and then encrypted into our Payment gateway providers database only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights to such systems, and are required to�keep the information confidential.”

I do not see SSL Implemented on Login or Register Page. Not even on Change Password Page.

Once you are registered with them, you can not change your account detail. they are doing this to stop abuses. BUT there should be option to change delivery address. I didn’t see that option when I logged in as member.

You can see your remaining bids at top of the page which is nice.
Overall website looks nice and worth trying. and I hope in near future they will take care of above mentioned issues. Cheers..

Registered by
BidMyDreams
Cerritos
Cerritos, California 90703
United States

This website is hosted on Shared hosting on GoDaddy.com.
Shared hosting for a penny auction website is not good idea as there are 5030 more websites hosted on same server.

I have checked code of BidMyDreams.com and Guess what .. It is using same script as SellMoo.com just with different look and feel.
They have same problems as i mentioned in my last post.

BidMyDreams review

Here are problems with website..
1. They do not have SSL implemented on website, which they should.
2. Just like SellMoo, they have information visible in server response. so your personal information like email, phone number, username can be viewed and misused.
3. Website is hosted on Shared Hosting which is not a good idea for Penny Auction Website.
4. Not Secure to use.

I hope their developers Could fix these issues ASAP.