Blue Bird Bids autobidding bot mystery deepens…
Bogus Bidders: Bots and Shills
Some dishonest auction sites use bid bots, which are computer programs that automatically bid on behalf of the website. And some fraudulent sites achieve the same effect using human shills.
You may be seconds away from winning an auction when another user places a bid. That keeps the clock ticking, and forces you into a bidding war to stay in first place.
Though the bidder appears to be another user, it may be a shill, or a bot programmed by the website to extend the auction and keep people bidding (and spending money) as they chase the “win.”
-FTC on penny auction autobidding bots (onguardonline.gov)
Earlier this month (possibly the last few days of December 2012), Blue Bird Bids pulled down their penny auctions citing the need for “maintenance”, “rigorous testing” and “behind the scenes structural changes” be carried out.
Once the auctions were down, Blue Bird Bids stated that the required maintenance would occur over ‘the next 72 hours or so‘ and that they would have ‘all functions back and running no later than Tuesday Jan 8th or Wednesday Jan 9th‘.
Well over 72 hours after this announcement was made the Blue Bird Bids penny auctions are still down, however that’s not to say things haven’t been happening behind the scenes…
On January the 5th 2013 the domain “DevBlueBirdBids” (“devbluebirdbids.com”) was registered and currently displays what appears to be a test version of the Blue Bird Bids auction website:
The site isn’t running any actual auctions and appears to have been hastily uploaded as it isn’t properly branded (running a Quibids template) and for the most part looks to be a default install of the “Penny Auction Wizards” penny auction script.
For reasons unknown, the domain registration for the DevBlueBirdBids website is set to private. However, with “dev” being short for “developer”, the Blue Bird Bids auction website being down and complete lack of motivation for a third-party to put up a website imitating the Blue Bird Bids auctions, I’d strongly suspect the domain is being used as a live test site for Blue Bird Bids itself.
What exactly they’re testing though I’m not sure.
Meanwhile the revelation that Blue Bird Bids is running on the Penny Auction Wizards auction script does shed some potential light on an article I penned a few days ago.
Late last year Blue Bird Bids ran their last “fantasy auction” for 2012. During the auction Vice-President Eric Swaim purportedly sent an email to Blue Bird Bids management on the issue of “auto-bots” driving up their auction prices.
In a position to do so, Swaim ran a check on some of the alleged auto-bidder accounts and discovered that none of the account showed up ‘as reps are customers in the system‘.
The logical conclusion drawn from this irregularity is that the accounts were most likely built into the auction backend and were being used by the company to artificially drive up auction prices.
A perusal of the Penny Auction Wizards website (the company behind the script being used on the new “devbluebirdbids” website), reveals that one of the features of their penny auction script is an “Auto Bidder System”, offering a “complete admin & user autobidder system“.
A user autobidder system I can understand, as customers using autobidders is pretty much an industry standard, but an admin autobidder system?
Why on Earth would a penny auction admin require an autobidder system themselves?
The only reason I can think of is to set up dummy accounts that won’t show up as either customers or affiliates and serve no other purpose than to bid against legitimate customers and affiliates, in order to drive up auction prices.
Or in other words, the exact behaviour Eric Swaim claimed to have witnessed when he personally observed the Blue Bird Bids penny auctions:
I have been watching the site most of the day and have noticed that we have had the same usernames bidding all day. When I tried to look them up in our system they do not show.
In perusing the Penny Auction Wizard website I couldn’t help but notice they showcase the “Bidsson” penny auctions in their “portfolio”:
Bidsson are the penny auctions of MLM company Bidify, who only just recently ditched a retail orientated compensation plan in favour of one that pays out affiliates based on bid purchases by their downlines.
Thus far I haven’t seen any reports of bots appearing on the Bidsson auctions but in using the same Penny Auction Wizards backend, the option to set up an “admin auto-bidder system” is always available to them.
One can only wonder how deep the MLM penny auction admin autobidder rabbit hole goes…
There was an article on PennyAuctionWatch that there was a scandal a few years back that there’s a trojan bidder written into the penny auction PHP script that basically prevents any “real” winners.
You might be able to get away with that for a while with a non-MLM penny auction but I don’t think it’d get you far in an MLM one.
Well at least not in the affiliate funded ones where the affiliates make up the bulk of the revenue and dump the bids on customers (or create dummy accounts to buy them as is the case now with Bidify).
Those with the larger downlines will soon figure out something’s not right in the auctions if anything dodgy is going on, as appears to be the case with Blue Bird Bids.
Seemed like I noticed a while back that the bids kept incrementing up past the actual value of the product being auctioned (at which point the “value” listed on the auction kept increasing as well).
I would say stay far away from any of these cheesy penny auctions. There’s no guarantee that they’re not set up just to take your money.
The admin auto bidder function is generally included in all penny auction scripts as a way to test auction load times and to simulate real traffic on a server.
This helps the auction owners test potential issues with a server or new code that has been added. It is NOT a mechanism to dupe real users during a live auction.
In fact this diagnostic function is regularly removed by our team when we setup up a site.
Most MLM Penny Auctions are public as well and are not sponsored by anyone on the MLM side. One way to see if your bidding against a known Professional penny auction bidder or if you suspect that a user might be a fake user is to check the username against (Ozedit: commercial website link removed).
If the user appears in this database you are probably bidding against a power bidder (professional bidder). These types of bidders would most likely not appear in the MLM side of the house.
That being said any average Joe off the street would not appear in either the MLM side or the all penny auction side.
Our two cents.
Yeah, right.
Is there anything stopping admins running bots against customer bidders though?
The VP of Blue Bird Bids found bidders not in the system, that strongly suggests someone with access to the auction backend (using your script) set up a bunch of bot bidders.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Every MLM company keeps track of every customer and affiliate bidder.
Footnote: In the future please don’t link to commercial subscription based ventures you may or may not be running.
Why not just set up an admin customer account to test the software? Then everyone would know what it was for.
That being said, even the auto bidder function doesn’t explain why a few different ID’s (which aren’t listed in the customer database) keep bidding on actual auctions, not to mention the special big auction for the Superbowl tickets. I guess they just needed to test the software that day.
This post mentions our company in it. That is the only reason why I am posting here. I have no idea what MLM is, I am simply responding to this thread.
Also I can confirm that this company was not using our software when the poster suggested they were. So “Oz” your statement that implies that they were using our software is completely false.
Simply signing up for a front end account would not work for load testing. The idea behind this is test hundreds of users at once bidding on a single auction.
Our software has two features which prevents this from happening from the front end. First, the admin testing the auction would need to have 100 unique IP addresses. Our system blocks people from using the same IP addresses from signing up with more than X accounts. Its purpose is to block spam signups.
The second feature is a load balance function. It blocks someone from having multiple browser windows opened. This prevents someone from having 10 windows opened and causing unnecessary server lag.
When we install our software the default setting on the test admin bidder function is automatically disabled.
That being said, we do not warranty anyone’s operation against using our functions for evil deeds. As I suggested above, if you have any issues with a Penny Auction you are bidding simply go elsewhere to spend your money. There are many reputable auctions out there.
So blahblahblah, at the end of the day setting up fake autobid bots on the admin end to artificially drive up prices and bid against legitimate customers is entirely possible.
Given that you’ve said this “feature” is ‘included in all penny auction scripts‘, whether Blue Bird Bids were using your script becomes irrelevant.
And I never implied they were using your software at the end of last year, I merely noted they were using it to test their auctions with. How long they’d been using (or not using) the Penny Auction Wizard script I have no idea.
I can’t help but wonder how long Bidify have been using it for…
I couldn’t care less about the customer experience, we analyse MLM business models here.
Blue Birds is a scam. They took your money and ran!