Blue Bird Bids VP raises concern over auction bots

Blue Bird Bids Vice-President Eric Swaim raised concerns about automated bidding bots within the company's penny auctions, according to an internal email. Swaim noted several usernames, including "nivea" and "leontas," placing bids despite not appearing in the company's customer or representative database.

Penny auction customers often struggle to verify they bid against real people. Automated bots can outbid human users in under a second. Participants find it hard to trust the auction's fairness.

More bids placed in a penny auction directly increase company revenue. In MLM penny auctions, this means higher commission payouts for affiliates. And the MLM model relies on affiliates attracting new customers. Affiliates promote only when they earn commissions.

An MLM company can ensure affiliate earnings by having customers bid against its own bots. This practice undermines auction legitimacy. But it guarantees affiliates sufficient earnings for continued promotion.

Customers typically voice these concerns. They are the ones losing money to bots they cannot beat. But Swaim's recent email to Blue Bird Bids corporate expressed similar worries.

"I have been getting some serious questions from the field on how the auction site is working," Swaim wrote. "We have people that sit and watch the auction basically all day and are accusing us of having auto-bots bidding against the field. I hope that is not the case."

Swaim detailed his observations. He watched the site for most of a day and saw the same usernames bidding repeatedly. He tried to find these users in the system; they were absent. "Some of the user names that are bidding are nivea, leontas, nija, zavania, evelin4ev just to name a few," he listed. "None of these show as reps or customers in the system." He asked for guidance on responding to the field about auto bidders.

Swaim's email reportedly led to an abrupt shutdown. A "fantasy auction" for SuperBowl tickets had registered over 103,000 bot bids before it stopped. Blue Bird Bids was declared the winner of the SuperBowl tickets.