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Comment by cesare | Hacker News Reader

Edit: Maybe there's an explanation for this but it still seems fishy to me.

How is it possible that the same people placed the same bids (in the same order) and end up with exactly the same amount for two different items in two different countries?

http://www.swoopo.com/auction/apple-macbook-mb466ll-a-13-3-i... http://www.swoopo.de/auktion/msi-x-slim-x340-su3523-weiss-/1...

(The links above are provided in the followup).

What is the probability of this happening? This means that even if they were all following these two items and placing the bids in the same order, nobody else outside of this group has placed a bid.

View on HN

EDIT: At first I thought they were just putting up dummy back-dated auctions to make the site seem more popular (and the deals better).

But check out the related auctions across the top for both pages -- the same numbers with the same winning bidders with the same (or similar!) products. All of them. So Germans are indeed bidding against US users -- one in dollars, the other in Euros? That doesn't make any sense

http://www.swoopo.de/auktion/fujitsu-siemens-amilo-xi-3650/1... http://www.swoopo.com/auction/asus-n90-series-n90sv-x1-18-4-...

Same ID number at the end of the URL. All the auctions appear to span both sites: http://www.swoopo.com/auction/x/194481.html http://www.swoopo.de/auktion/x/194481.html This one actually does the dollars to euros conversion properly

So clearly people just get an item "similar" to the one they won. You'd think for the massive house advantage they have, they could at least deliver the exact product that you thought you won.

Yes, they call this "international auctions." If you poke around in their FAQ you'll see this documented.

Except they're not always for the same item, and somehow a 100 USD bid beats a 99 EUR bid?

Yes, that's right. In the TechCrunch thread about this, "Valentin" noticed that this is documented in their FAQ as well. The reason given is that the item being sold off may not be available in one of the countries. I (@dmolnar) gave an example where the US bidders win an iPhone 3GS, while the UK bidders win a 3G. Quite different propositions!

Pierre Carion then pointed out that as far as he can tell, the API doesn't even count the type of currency. So even though it's not remotely fair, a 100 USD bid will beat a 99 EUR bid just because it's the most recent bid.

See the comments here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/unique-auction-site-swo...

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