savageinfidel

Since I'm reasonably sure that our car will be totaled (not totally, but I'd put 10/1 odds on it being the case, after looking at the car), it looks like I'll be buying a new one. So, I started looking around on the various sites. On CraigsList, they warned about "Ebay scams". There was a 2009 Nissan Altima with 29,000 miles listed for $2900. Too good to be true, so I figured it was phony. Just in case, I figured I'd send an email. Here's my response (highlighting is mine, to point out the "fishy" parts. Hello, This 2009 Nissan Altima 2.5 S, automatic with 26,000 miles, runs and drives excellent(VIN: 1N4AL21E49N522850). This car has been extremely well maintained and it is fully paid. No accident, clear title, free of liens. I have dropped my price to $2900 since this is an urgent sale and I need to sell it before 22 March, when I will be deployed in Afghanistan replacing the troops scheduled to come home. (Note: appeal to sympathy...

A couple of years back, I was on the train (coming back from a consulting gig), and, being an extrovert, I started talking with a guy sitting next to me. He was a "stock tout". In other words, he was one of those guys who sent out emails pushing one stock or another. He claimed it was a pretty profitable business. Now I have some evidence backing him up. Here's a pretty interesting piece on the market effects of internet stock spam spam. A couple of years ago, Well, Frieder and Zittrain did a study titled Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity. They found that on spammers "touting" (i.e. pushing) a stock has some pretty significant effects on the touted stock's price and trading volume. Here's the abstract (emphasis mine): We assess the impact of spam that touts stocks upon the trading activity of those stocks and sketch how profitable such spamming might be for spammers and how harmful it is to those who heed ...

Winner's curse is the well-known phenomenon where the winner of an auction is often just the person who's most likely to have overpaid for the item in question. So, often the winner is the loser. Then I heard about Swoopo.com . It's been called "pure distilled evil in a business plan". Here's their setup: Bidding for an item starts at $0.15 Each bid raises the price by $0.15 Bids cost $0.75 to make. Here's the kicker - a bid in the final seconds extends the auction for 15 seconds. So, auctions can go on and on. Of course, they post the "savings" you would receive if you bought the item at the current price as a prod for people to continue betting. They also hold "penny auctions" on their front page - a bid only increments the price by a penny. I recently saw a TomTom GPS sold for about $12. That means 1200 bids at $0.75 per bid, for revenue of $900, on something that costs them between $300 and $500. Not too shabby. This is a b...