My wife thought it would be good to try to get an iPad for Christmas and the bargainoo.com site seemed to have the most reasonable ending values of the penny auction sites. She created an account, bought a bid pack, and began bidding.

The FIRST clue was that the iPad she was bidding on never ended while she was bidding.

The SECOND clue was when she was the high bidder, the timer would often get down to ONE second (sometimes ZERO seconds), and then a new high bidder was listed. On a couple auctions, if she placed her bid with still a couple seconds left in the auction, she got a response that the auction had already ended. She started bidding on another iPad auction, but didn't have very many bids left. When she left to purchase more bids, the auction ended while she was gone. She started bidding on yet a third iPad auction and that auction just kept going and going. Since she didn't want to "leave" the auction after being in it so long, I created a new account for me, bought a bid pack, planning to enter the bidding when she ran out of bids.

The THIRD clue was that I COULD NOT FIND HER AUCTION!!! Even though she stated that "new bidders" were regularly joining her auction, it was nowhere to be found on the Bargainoo site. At this point, I guess it was just her against the bots. Since I wasn't couldn't find her auction, I just started bidding on a iPod Touch.

The FOURTH clue was that, as long as I was bidding, the auction continued. It quickly became evident that I was the one keeping the auction going. None of the other bidders were bidding against each other. The iPod price continued rising to over THREE TIMES what the "normal" auction ending price was for the iPods. MANY times while I was the high bidder, the auction would get down to ZERO seconds, and then show a new high bidder. At this point, I was completely convinced that this site was a scam. So, I decided to just keep bidding until I ran out of bids, to see what would happen. This took HOURS, as I had quite a few bids. But I finally ran out of bids and, the auction that was so hot with bidders that it ran on for hours, ironically, ended less than a minute later.

And the FIFTH, and final, clue was that the auction that I "lost" NEVER SHOWED UP on the listing for the "Recently Ended" auctions for iPods, proving that Bargainoo would never want to acknowledge that an iPod auction actually went for over THREE TIMES what their other "bait" listings showed.