Swoopo is Not Of This Earth

I have seen the sulfurous, obsidian demon-heart of web commerce, and its name is Swoopo. It’s simple enough: you buy an amount of bids for the products on their site. Each time you bid, the auction price goes up $0.15 and the auction is extended 15 seconds. Some times, few enough people bid, that you can find 8 GB iPod touches for $34.65 (!!!).

It’s at this point that the Voldemorts at Swoopo, recognizing the avarice and addictive greed within 97.2% of all consumers, stand back and allow the customers to devour themselves and their remaining savings. As Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror put it:

In short, swoopo is about as close to pure, distilled evil in a business plan as I've ever seen. They get paid for everything up front, and as they drop ship everything there's no inventory or overhead to worry about. It is almost brilliantly evil, in a sort of evil genius way.

Don’t go. You’ll get sucked in, and soon you’ll be pulling a Gollum-dive into the molten hell of Mt. Doom known as a credit score of 230.