A step aside from online video to point out a post on Barrons Tech Trader Daily about a company I worked for a while back, bidz.com.

A negative report this week from Citron Research has sparked a steep selloff in bidz.com stock after pointing to irregular bidding activity and a major shareholder and supplier convicted in the 80s for fencing stolen jewelry.

Bidz today went back on the offensive, threatening legal action on a day when the Citron website has experienced Denial of Service attacks

In case you’ve ever considered buying from Bidz, consider these tales from my time there: the “$1 no reserve” claim they flaunt has always been a joke.

When items were sold below a certain price they would error out in the system preventing the sale. Customer service was instructed to tell users the merchandise was damaged or oversold.

There were countless complaints that a piece of jewelry a customer purchased appeared used, had an engraving, or came with a photocopied or otherwise altered certificate of authenticity.

I never myself saw shill bidding, but I did see a number of user accounts with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise purchased at prices way above what a reasonable person would pay for them.

If you buy from bidz, or own stock, good luck. Frankly I’m amazed none of this came out sooner, I never thought the company would be around this long.

Tags: bidz.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under News, blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.