Surfing the listings at eBay, you’ll see hundreds of auctions that are just tricks to rip idiot buyers off.
The favorite trick of… I’d say clever sellers, but if the buyers took a minute to read the details of the auction instead of just looking at the pictures, they would clue into the fact that the seller is trying to rip people off. The trick is to post pictures of a console and a misleading auction title like “Buy Playstation 3” and then put in the details that buyers are actually bidding on the Playstation 3 web site name domain and not the actual console.
Buyers are so quick to bid that they don’t realize what they’re really bidding on and then the winner get stuck paying for an item that they didn’t want. Really this should be against the rules of eBay selling and everyone of these auction types should be removed, but god forbid eBay actually police their own auctions.
The most recent one of these trick auctions is agentlemen sellingthe answer to a contest to win a Nintendo Wii. He claims he has won two Wiis himself with the answer, and he’s offering to sell it so another person can win Wiis too.
If you check out the web site he lists for the Wii contest, you’ll see that Websprite.org is a holding a contest where every 150th caller wins a Nintendo Wii, if the caller can answer the skill testing question, for which the eBay seller is selling the answer for.
The tough question that is apparently worth $446.20 US at this moment: What was the name of another classic Nintendo console? Nintendo 2005, Nintendo 222 or Nintendo 64.
Hope the idiot that bid highest on the answer wins that Nintendo Wii contest, because by this point he could have bought two Nintendo Wiis for the cost of the answer. The dumbest part of this whole auction is that the winner isn’t even guaranteed any wins of the console anyway, because you still have to be the 150th caller. Also the calls cost $1.15 a minute and each call lasts 3 minutes long, so the winner will rack up more money just trying to win the console.
