stiwin.com and paddygold.com

DickyRock

stiwin.com and paddygold.com are 'Entertainment Shopping' Sites, or Penny Auction sites as they're more widely known. It is a form of gambling. Some may argue differently, but if you participate in one for a while I think you'll agree that you are gambling.

Some Penny Auction sites use what is know as auto bidders, or shill bidders.

Definition: Shill bidding is the act of bidding on your own auction against other bidders in order to raise the price at which the item will eventually sell.

In the case of a penny auction, each bid that is placed raises the item price by a certain amount, usually 5c, and the auction end time by a certain amount, usually 10/15/20 seconds. You win the item by being the last person to have bid on an item when the time counter hits zero.

In order to bid, you have to buy bid packages, which come in packs of 10, 55, 120 and so on, and can cost €5/25/55 etc respectively.Therefore, for each bid placed by a legitimate bidder, the site owners takes in anything from 50c to 41c per bid. If a legitimate bidder is betting against a shill bidder, they can potentially end up spending close to or near the retail price of the item they are bidding on. For e.g. a TV with a RRP of €1000 has bids totalling €90 on it. Lets say the legitimate bidder has bought a 120 bid package for €50 and placed 50 bids throughout the auction already but has yet to win anything. The site owner has already pulled in €738 in cash from the bids that have been placed. Add to that the €90 they will get from the person who wins the item, and you can see how the profit margins start quickly rising, especially when that TV they are RRP'ing at €1000 they're actually buying off amazon for €600.

I have participated as a bidder on stiwin.com over the last few days and my suspicions are that they are using auto bidders, thus greatly reducing a participants chances of winning anything, or winning something without having first placed a high number of bids yourself, or the item in question having had a high number of bids placed on it by legitimate bidders.

The Penny Auction watchdog site, pennyauctionwatch.com has reported that a site run by the same people as those that run stiwin.com and that are hosted on the same servers as paddygold.com are 'possibly' using bot shill bidders. The software used to run both sites allow the use of an auto bidding script

I am informing you of this now so that if you or your friends come across either of these sites that you are made aware of the potential usage of bot shill bidders on these sites.

If you want to get into this game then I would recommend you read through some of the posts on pennyauctionwatch.com first and get familiar with the sites that appear to be giving people a fair chance to win. Bear in mind though that stiwin.com and paddygold.com appear to be the only sites operating in Ireland. The other sites do not seem to allow Irish participants but I haven't confirmed that on every penny auction site out there.

I have a thread open on pennyauctionwatch.com that covers this topic also. I am bringing these sites to the attention of the Ombudsman so any progress made with his office I will be reporting there.