I'm not certain it's a 100% scam, but it certainly preys on a certain subset of people. Let me tell you my story, and you can come to your own conclusion.
I was approached by the owner of the bidray site. He wanted me to assist him in advertising/promoting his site (for $x/month, I'd put a link to his site on my webpage). I told him I'd check out his site and let him know (I had never heard of bidray and knew nothing about how it operated). He credited me $300 dollars worth of bids to try out the bidray site.
I went on the site and bid on a few things, quickly figuring out that you've got to be extremely lucky or sink a ton of cash into purchasing bids in order to "win" an item. I decided to run a little experiment and focused my attention on a little $50 amazon giftcard (the cheapest thing on the site).
Bidray allows you to set up a "bid buddy" which automatically places bids for you before the timer on the particular "auction" expires (this ain't no auction - it's a twisted raffle). I placed a ton of bids on the giftcard before I went to bed (maybe 30-40) and then set up the bid buddy for overnight. I am now 123 bids into the auction (so theoretically have spent $123 on my $50 giftcard), and have been bidding against ONLY 1 other person for the last 8 hours or so. So, this other bidder has probably sunk about 50-60 (maybe more) bids into the $50 auction item (they're in the hole, but refusing to quit bidding). This makes them either (a) extremely stupid, (b) someone from bidray, or (c) someone else who has received a bunch of free bids from bidray. By the way, the auction price of the $50 giftcard is now $3.20 (meaning bidray has theoretically made $270 on this auction, if the bidders had actually paid $1 per bid).
I'm guessing that the people who have actually paid money for their bids have no idea that they may be bidding against people given hundreds of dollars in free bids. I'm certain that I'm going to run out of free bids before I "win" the item, and there is obviously no way I'm dumb enough to purchase bids on my own.
Needless to say, I'm not allowing bidray to advertise on my site. I'm not certain of the legality of the venture (each state has it's own laws regarding raffles - I'm assuming bidray "donates" the final price of each item to charity - not out of the goodness of their hearts - but in an attempt to "legitimize" the site - i.e., we're not making money off the sale of these items, we just happen to make money off the $1 service fee per bid we charge to use the site).
Purchase bids and go crazy if you want, but buyer beware.
