71–80 of 135 posts
So one step that could be taken would be for Google to ban them from their advertising network. Would Google do this? I don't know, but the answer would be revealing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how this is different from any auction at eBay, Christie's, Philips, or your local car auction.
For the purposes of this message, I define "pay" as "money out of your pocket, including the money spent 'purchasing' 'bids'." In a real auction, if you are willing to pay twice the market price, you are almost (but not quite) guaranteed to win, and you will almost (but not quite) certainly be paying less than 2x market value. The only person who can beat you is someone willing to pay 2x+change. (When you lose, you d…
The term "scam" requires that the person being scammed was not given the facts upfront. This is not a scam by any stretch of the imagination since the company posts the technical details plainly and clearly on their website. You may not like the way the business is structured, but it is certainly no scam.
Pardon my ignorance... Why does the author call this website illegal? I'm not sure what laws they are violating.
It will likely be called a raffle because buying the "tickets" costs money and you will very likely get nothing for it. In almost all states in the USA, raffles are illegal as part of the private lottery statutes. In practice, enforcement agents usually look the other way for small non-profit raffles like the kind held in church basements for pies and such. They are extremely unlikely to look the other way in this ca…
It is NOT a raffle because a raffle winner is selected 100% by chance whereas at swoopo the winner is the person who bids the highest price -- and bidding the highest price is not based on chance.
What they're doing is most probably not illegal. What they are doing is leveraging a lot of little things to make themselves good cash. Let's be very clear - they use auctions. This is not a lottery. At the end of the day, the high bidder "wins" and pays the amount of the high bid to win the auction. Then Swoopo adds the (.75 * number of bids placed) to that figure. It's not inconceivable that that sum is less than M…
Its not an auction if bidding costs money regardless if you win or not. Its more of a raffle.
Show me the law that says this and I might begin to believe that you have a point here ... but right now I do not. I don't know much about auction laws, but I've never heard of it being illegal to charge for participation, and if it is in fact illegal then there must be someone online who has complained about it or files a case somewhere ...
I can't believe this company is offering a scenario where you pay an upfront cost to try to get something for less than it usually sells for. I haven't seen anybody get away with that since basically every retail outlet in America charged an upfront cost -- time and inconvenience -- for the chance to buy stuff at a discount, on Black Friday . Unprecedented. I have no idea why measuring certain things in dollars rathe…
Wow. This is both genius, and despicable. It's amazing what kind of profit they drive, yet it seems like they're really taking advantage of people with gambling addictions, or poor money management skills.
If people want to gamble, why not let them? How is this any different than operating a casino? It's not wrong to provide a service that many people deem enjoyable just because a small portion of them can't exert the self-control to use it responsibly.
Pardon my ignorance... Why does the author call this website illegal? I'm not sure what laws they are violating.
The expression "profitable until deemed illegal" is used when what the business is doing is so obviously despicable and evil that if it continues the government will probably pass a law against it. (This is basically an offshore gambling site we're talking about, though, no more and no less. Therefore, I'm not sure how apt the expression is to what's actually going to happen.) Or, to put it another way, it's so fiend…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will likely be called a raffle because buying the "tickets" costs money and you will very likely get nothing for it. In almost all states in the USA, raffles are illegal as part of the private lottery statutes. In practice, enforcement agents usually look the other way for small non-profit raffles like the kind held in church basements for pies and such. They are extremely unlikely to look the other way in this ca…
"It will likely be called a raffle because buying the "tickets" costs money and you will very likely get nothing for it." It is NOT a raffle because a raffle winner is selected 100% by chance whereas at swoopo the winner is the person who bids the highest price -- and bidding the highest price is not based on chance.
Pardon my ignorance... Why does the author call this website illegal? I'm not sure what laws they are violating.
It will likely be called a raffle because buying the "tickets" costs money and you will very likely get nothing for it. In almost all states in the USA, raffles are illegal as part of the private lottery statutes. In practice, enforcement agents usually look the other way for small non-profit raffles like the kind held in church basements for pies and such. They are extremely unlikely to look the other way in this ca…
For another, state Attorneys General are hesitant to try internet-related cases that violate sweepstakes laws unless it's more or less in the bag. It's a giant legal gray area and they don't want to set an unfavorable precedent.