Bid4That.net = Vuulu.com

Before I begin I have to say that I have not verified any of this. However I received an email yesterday from an informant who wanted to let me know that Bid4That.net is now Vuulu.com. She wrote to me because when she went to Google and searched for Bid4That my site came up first before any of the press releases etc.

I would hate to see this site back up and running because if you have been following anything I have covered in the past about Bid4That you will know that they were around for a few days just to scam people out of their hard earned money. As I mentioned before I have not done any domain whois or traceroutes or anything to validate this claim however it would not surprise me that they are under the same ownership. Continue reading to see the email in it’s entirety from the informant.

Hi,

I thought you’d want to know that Bid4That is back under a new name vuulu.com. Its more scammy than ever. The man behind it is called Mike Kaufman. He parternered up with a designer, marketting guy and network administrator to make Bid4That using off the shelf software called ‘Swoopo Clone’. Bid4That shut down because they weren’t able to sell products at the prices they were going for. They hired several developers who all dropped out until they found me, I done some work for their marketting guy on a few of his sites, originally they told me they just needed the script their other developer wrote finished off and it was 3 days (at 2 hours a day) from being finished. When I got the script it was barely started, so I started again from scratch.

The new site uses ‘auto-bidders’ (technically their old script did it too but they never bothered to set it up properly) I created 2500 fake user accounts to bid on items that were about to expire below a configurable threshold of real bids, ie. a product costing them $100, would need 200 bids at 50c a bid before it could be sold, except they set the thresholds to be 1.5x the price for regular auctions and 3x the price for penny auctions, they may have changed these thresholds now to even higher.

The site was rushed to ‘live’ at Mike’s request but I was still finishing off some back end details. Christian (the PR guy) basically told Mike that he had been working on the project for 3 months (including time on bid4that) and needed to get some money from the project. Mike made death threats to him (and recently sent him an email with his home address on it to prove he knows where Chris lives). This caused Mike to change all the passwords to the site so I couldn’t get online to finish it off (or take it off-line when my payment didn’t arrive – he wanted to pay by bank transfer, which can take up to a week). He said he couldn’t give me the new passwords but he’d talk to Mario (the network guy) and get back to me, then the next day he said he hadn’t paid his internet bill but would be back online the next day. He was off-line for a couple of days and then when he came back he said he’d sold the site to a guy he met called ‘Tom Beers’ and didn’t need to pay me because he wasn’t using the site. That was clearly a lie because there are press releases from after that time with his name on. It turns out he promised the 3 partners a percentage so they’d work for free for months and then kicked them off the project once it had gone live. I was the only one offered money (and it was pathetically small amount for the work involved but in this economic climate its hard to turn down work even when the job is totally dodgy)

Your site comes #1 for Bid4That – above all their press releases. It would be great to see the same thing for vuulu.
Regards,
Informant

If you have tried this site and were unable to get them to ship you the products you won please leave some comments here. Unfortunately I will be too busy with work and life to investigate this myself. However I do warn people that auction sites should not charge you to make bids. However I do not argue that this is a good business model if used properly. The problem with Bid4That.net was that they were not sending out the products and used every excuse they could find in order to not have to ship the product.

You might be asking well how were they scamming people if they were not sending the products… They were refunding your bids right? In a sense yes they were refunding the winning bidders bids, however they were not refunding EVERY bidders bids. If you and I were going through a bidding war and I won the auction they would refund my bids and cancel the delivery. What about the money you spent on bids? Well that went straight into their pockets.