I followed an ad link to "Cheapsville Auctions". At face value, it appears to be a regular auction site, but everything has a MAXIMUM bid of 1% of the product's going price. That is, a Mini Cooper has a maximum bid of $194.25. A Segway Scooter Human Transporter has a maximum bid of $49.99. Now, that may have made perfect sense in 1999 (we'll make it up in volume!) but, naturally, there's a catch. Well, two catches, actually.

First, there's a "bid fee" of $10. So, you pay $10 to place a bid. There are a MAXIMUM number of bids. For the Segway, it's 978 bids. That means, the company will make $9,870 on the "bid fees", making the actual selling price pretty much irrelevant.

OK, so we know how the company makes money, but if it's an auction, with a maximum bid, why the heck would you not just bid the maximum and automatically win? Well, here's the gimmick. The highest UNIQUE bid wins. That means, if 20 people bid $49.99, but you're the only person who bids $49.98 - you win! If there are no unique bids above a penny, and you bid $0.01 - you win!

So, it's not an auction at all, it's really a paid sweepstakes with a bit of psychological strategy tossed in.

Odds are, they're out of business within the month, but it's still a very clever idea. Meanwhile, one of the *cough* auctions is for an XBox, with NO "bid fee", so you may as well play along for free and try to win that.