The thing about Dollar Auctions or All-Pay Auctions (neither are really anything new) is that they play on the gamblers mentality by making it a pseudo game. Th

The thing about Dollar Auctions or All-Pay Auctions (neither are really anything new) is that they play on the gamblers mentality by making it a pseudo game. The actual winner, if actually well-invested in to the auction, may end up purchasing the item for $100, plus their portion of the 10k bids so in reality they could really be spending close to retail price on the actual product. That is of course assuming that the actual Dollar Auction is being run fairly and there even is a legitimate winner in the end. There are various other sites just like this including Swoopo, which reported 28.3 million revenue in 2008. IMHO it's not necessarily a scam, but certainly plays on the gullibility of the consumers and is indeed a ripoff. For an interesting article, check out Joshua Stein's attempt at gaming Swoopo programmatically: http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2009/03/06/trying_to_game_swoopo_com/ http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2009/03/06/trying_to_game_swoopo_c...