DealCent - Fake OR Real?

[jey raul]

I have won couple of product. Simple strategy is go for all the products which has nearly $13. You can find most of product sold at rate of $11 to $14. Maybe I was lucky to win it. But at least i know they did not scam me.

[MovieZay]

If this is real you will spend too much money before wining an iPod or anything else. my suggestion is to leave it cause it's not worth the money you will spend.

[Miguel]

Penny auction sites are not fake, some are scam but some legit ones do work with this system.

You have to buy bids which are actually expensive (this is where they get money for the products). Then when you bid, you increase the price of the product slightly (normally $0.01) until you're the last bidder. Then you just pay for the final price, however, they had already earned from all the spent bids. Trust me, they profit more like this than if they had been selling the item at the original price.

[Loonycgb2]

each bid they charge you your bid price + 60 cents...

So it will triple your payment

[plato]

It looks fake...

[sroussi]

think about it.
you can win a ipad for ~15$, at 0.01$ a bid, it means 1500 bids.
if there are 10 bidders, each one spent 150 bids = 100$
115$ for a ipad seems worth to me... the real winner of course is the site who sold a ipad for 1000$

[sash]

Hi, I am complaining here about the online bidding website www.dealcent.com. I have tried this website and lost 380$.
About Dealcent: is a bidding website where you have to buy bids and bid on things like ipod/iphone/ipad/psp etc. You can buy around 150bids for 92$. Each product starts with a fixed price and people start bidding online. The bid is active for 10secs and each bid will add an extra 10secs, so whos ever is the last bid when timer becomes 0, is the winner.
Here is my story -
a) When I first saw the website I was really attracted to it because I saw that an iphone could be won at around 11$. In fact whenever I saw the website an iphone would be sold in range 10-13$. The bid starts with around 8$ for an iphone.
I bought bids and started bidding only after the price has crossed 10$. The idea of bidding is to bid at the last second. So I started bidding at timer=1sec, after a certain number of bids, my bid at 1sec was not taken and the guy before me won. This repeatedly happened. Then I started bidding at timer=2sec, again my bid at 2sec was not honored more than once and the guy before me won.
b) Then I though I should bid at either 4 or 4 sec and it should be a safe time. With this I went till around 150bids in one of the attempts and the price of iphone kept going on till 18$, and again I lost when one of bid at 1sec was not honored.
I again purchased more bids and tried, once again I reached around 150+ bids in one attempt and again the price of iphone went till around 18$ and I lost as bids got finished.

Now there are 2 things here,
a) my bids at timer=1sec and timer=2sec were not honored consistently.
b) The price of iphone went till 18$ only I was bidding around 150bids, otherwise everytime it is in the range of 10-13$.

Why I think they are cheating -
a) Bids at 2sec, 1sec are dishonored in a random manner. This cannot be a technical flaw. This is a randomly generated cheating mechanism.
b) The iphone bid starts at 8$ and always sells in the range 10-13$. When there is no limit over how many people can bid and how many times will each bidder bid, and when people from around the world are bidding, how can a product sell consistently in the same price range? In fact this is true for all the products in the website, all of them have a very very consistent selling price range.

People do win in dealcent, once in a while, this helps them show they are legit. I think what they do is, to have their own fake bidders, who keep outbidding each other and always settle at a fixed price range, so that whoever sees the site will be sure that he too can win in the same price range. But when a real bidder comes, the fake bidders donot stop and price keeps going on and on, and obviously the real bidder runs out of bids and a fake bidder wins again. I am sure whenever a bid at 1sec or 2sec is not honored and bidder before you wins, he is a fake bidder from the company itself.

As a proof, I have atttached a excel sheet which shows the selling price for 3 products on their website. I have sampled around 30 won auctions for 6 days. You can clearly see the unbeleivable consistency in selling price for all 3 products. Bidding is a highly random probabilistic scenario and this kind of consistency cannot be real.

Dealcent is letting win 1 in N bidders and this keeps them safe because there are real winners too. They also claim that there is no average selling price which is a clear lie after looking at the attached image.

[Shahrukh]

I trust this guy, this site seams to be Producing fake bids to get the price high - Scam threat maybe