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DealDash is a penny auction site where users have to pay money for each bid they place. This means you’re spending money regardless of winning.

Some people call this system a scam. And they are correct, but often for incorrect reasons. There are many shady practices I’ve uncovered in this article that make Deal Dash seem completely not legit. Most of the people on Deal Dash are gambling addicts who spend all of their free time bidding, often losing huge amounts of money in the process.

I’ll go through how exactly: DealDash.com works, what the products are, how the most active users make the most of their bids, and how a very few established players have gamed the system to, in essence, get unlimited free bids. These are secrets not commonly known, and aren’t shared anywhere other than right here on LetsGoBidding.com, the only place to get completely free Deal Dash statistics showing it is a scam.

How They Bring You In

You’ve seen the commercials. You can win that high end electronics device for mere dollars! Over 90% off retail prices!

Obviously this sounds too good to be true, and if it were true it would be a terrible business model. Yet they have been going strong since 2009.

A website that has to put “Fair & Honest” in its own title is already a little suspect. Let’s dive in to see if DealDash is as legitimate as their claim.

The Fine Print

We can see that the retail price, used for comparison, is the “Buy It Now” price. This is very important and we’ll come back to it later.

The end price includes two factors: The price of the item it was bid up to, and the cost of each bid spent on the auction. Since bids aren’t free, there really is no upper limit to how much money someone can inadvertently spend on an auction. Even the people who don’t win end up losing money. This makes it different from what you would expect from a typical auction.

Here’s another interesting statistic. 54% of auction winners save 90% off Buy It Now Prices or more. Is DealDash really giving away over half of their items at a 90% discount?

No, They’re not.

The Buy It Now Price is Extremely Overinflated

The best way to check for good deals is to find how much the item sold for on Ebay.com. Whatever products are selling for (not being listed as) on Ebay is the fair market value of that item. Since many items on DealDash can also be bought on Ebay it’s easy to see how much real people are actually paying for them.

A dinnerware set significantly overpriced on Dealdash.

Another example where DealDash is claiming a jacket is worth 25-times more than what it sold for on Ebay.

These aren’t cherry-picked. You’ll see a steep overvaluation of nearly every item. There’s a reason DealDash gets away with this. They can point to each of these product’s exorbitantly high retail price because:

80% of all Products listed on DealDash were made by companies associated with DealDash

You’ve probably never heard of Galton Voysey, but you’ve definitely seen their products while browsing through DealDash.com. You can find a complete takedown of the company and its relationship to Dealdash. In summary, The founder of DealDash is also the chairman of Galton Voysey. Almost all of the products they make are manufactured in China and sold exclusively for Dealdash.com.

It’s difficult to determine what all the DealDash products are, because they are designed not to be publicly associated with each other. I believe the following is at least a partial list of brands made in house and specifically marketed to be used by DealDash.

• Bolvaint
• Kamikoto
• Aava
• Schultz
• Wilson & Miller
• Verdict
• New Haven
• The Barrel Shack
• Ashlynn Avenue
• Cate & Chloe
• Bardenshire
• Isselle
• Émilie & Théo
• Somtex
• Far East Collection
• Dulccio
• Volsen
• Wilcott Weaves
• Adamant
• Crossford Furniture Co.
• Waleigh
• Robert Matthew
• J. W. Krogman
• Monolith
• Joshua Steinberg
• Millstrand Co.
• Burkfield Stonewall
• Miranella

Try to learn more about these brands and you see the same patterns. They have generic shopify hosted websites. And their facebook pages are mainly empty, with an impossiblely high number of likes.

This doesn’t mean they are bad products, only that you know nothing about them; Which makes it difficult to tell what they are worth.

DealDash has complete control over the Buy It Now price

Deal Dash’s main claim to being “Fair and Honest” is that you can get your bids returned for free, if you buy the item at full Buy It Now price.

Is this really fair when DealDash can arbitrarily make the Buy It Now price whatever they like? If anyone tries to sue them, they can point to these real products with real prices (that they control) to claim that the system is fair. If you don’t win, you can buy the product at retail value and get your bids back. Except the retail value is so much more than the item is worth.

I don’t have statistics to back up how many people actually do use the Buy It Now feature, but it can’t be many. In most cases you would be spending multiple times more money than the product is worth. This is unfair to those who place bids but lose an auction, but is it even possible to win?

Easy Beginner Auctions

After you make a new account on Deal Dash, you will get additional auctions on the main page that other regular users will not see. Mostly they’re Beanies or gift cards. There’s nothing specifically labeling them as beginner auctions. The only way to tell is if:

A. The auction ends with zero bids placed. (This almost never happens)
B. Copy the url of the auction to an incognito browser. If it’s a beginner auction it will redirect you to the home page listing of all auctions.

There’s no time limit here, you’ll keep getting the same items over and over again every couple minutes so wait until you see something you like. A better strategy would be to get whatever has the highest Buy It Now price, but I’ll explain that later.

Just remember, this will be the only easy win you will ever find on Deal Dash. It’s designed to sucker you in, make you think you’re good at Deal Dash. The truth is, the game was rigged from the start.

The Same People on DealDash Keep Winning

If you’re already active on Deal Dash, you’ve probably noticed a trend where the same people are winning every auction. You’ve certainly seen the name UncleTan before. This is because the same handful of people are winning most of the auctions.

The top 1% of winners win 60% of all auctions. If you’re bidding against one of these professional auction bidders, you’re going to lose. Their reputation is what makes them so successful. Few people even try to bid against them. They will throw down thousands of bids exceeding an item’s value just so you will never try to challenge them again.

This is a recent example where UncleTan won an auction by bidding over 8000 times on an inexpensive laptop. If we assume each bid costs $0.12 (which is a reasonable price for bids), UncleTan used over $1000 worth of bids to win a single $479 item. He may do this on any auction. You would be foolish to bid against him.

You might be wondering about the people who are winning thousands of auctions, what are they doing with their winnings? The answer is critical to how Deal Dash works, and it isn’t what you expect.

Selling Cheap Deal Dash Winnings on Ebay

I have heard the theory that there is a cabal of elite Deal Dash users winning all the auctions so that they can resell the items on Ebay for profit. There are a few problems with this theory.

First, if this was a feasible strategy, wouldn’t it make more sense for DealDash to skip the middle man and sell all their in-house products directly on ebay? One problem, as we’ve already shown, is that items consistently sell on Ebay for a small fraction of what DealDash says they are worth.

While we do see exclusive DealDash products being sold on ebay, we can easily check the scale at which this is happening. On this site I have records of every auction won on Dealdash.com. I can take a popular Deal-Dash-Only item such as the Volsen Atom Cordless Vacuum and compare how many times it has been auctioned off on DealDash and how many times it has sold on Ebay in the past 3 months.

My statistics show this vacuum cleaner has been won 440 times on DealDash the past 3 months. During the same period, it has been sold on ebay twice.

The volume of DealDash exclusive items being re-sold on ebay is nowhere near high enough to explain what all these consistent winners are doing with their thousands of wins.

We’ll take a closer look at one of the most eye-brow-raising products being sold on DealDash to get a better picture(or should I say painting?) of what is really going on.

The Far East Collection of Paintings

In DealDash’s own words, this is how the Far East Collection describes itself:

All their paintings are conveniently anonymous, but trust them, these are works of arts worth thousands of dollars! Odder still, they aren’t anonymous. All of them are signed, often by the same artist.

Their facebook page is completely empty, except it has over 1000 likes! Also their website has been Suspended for some time, but even looking at it on the wayback machine, there was never anything on it. Yet still, somehow, an endless stream of anonymous paintings are making their way onto Dealdash.

It gets even weirder.

Look at the statistics for any of the Far East Collection paintings on the letsgobidding.com website. You will see that the same painting has been auctioned and won dozens of times before.

Too add another dimension to this, I was able to find this exact same painting listed on ebay, which has been sitting unsold for months. At the same time the very same painting was being auctioned on DealDash.

If you look at the details I’ve collected on this site, it seems the same paintings get auctioned off every 4-5 days. Unlike other auctions, there is no list of previous winners or any indication that this item has been won before on DealDash!

I suppose it’s not technically illegal If DealDash has a factory of people making the same painting over and over again. Although, is a retail price in the thousands really right for this type of artwork?

This is an interesting view into the sketchy business practices surrounding Deal Dash, but it still doesn’t explain what all the winners are doing with their spoils. I don’t have much proof, but I have a pretty good theory.

Nobody is Buying Anything

Let’s put aside the theory that DealDash has a bunch of fake accounts that bid up auctions and prevent you from winning. DealDash isn’t scamming you that obviously. They don’t need to do that because their own users will do it for them.

Every time you win an auction, you can either buy the item at the auction price, or return the item and get a number (typically the Buy It Now price) of bids in return.

My theory is that all of the frequent bidders, including UncleTan, are exchanging wins for bids on just about every auction as a means to increase their pool of bids. For free.

To make this theory work, we would have to see that the top bidders are able to consistently win auctions with fewer bids than the Buy It Now price. If they won an auction while using less bids than the Buy It Now Price then they could exchange that win for more bids which would net them even more bids than they started out with!

For example, if someone won one of the Far East Collections paintings with 1000 bids, and the painting had a Buy It Now price of $2000. That win could be exchanged for 2000 bids. It would double the bids and cost nothing.

And it’s true! Look at the statistics, there are many big players who are winning auctions with fewer than the Buy It Now price number of bids. As of this writing, UncleTan has a system where he can get back 132% of all bids he places. He’s not even the best at this trick.

I think this theory makes the most sense, how else can these players put down thousands of bids on items they couldn’t want, have no use for, and aren’t re-selling on Ebay? It’s because they don’t want the item, they want the bids. It’s a never ending cycle of farming bids so they never have to pay for their own. During this time, DealDash is profiting off the 99% of users who can’t see what’s really happening.

The DealDash.com Economy

I’ve gone through multiple facets of how Deal Dash works in this article, and they all fit together into the overall profit model of DealDash. It’s based on 5 core principles.

1. The majority of the Products auctioned on DealDash are made cheaply by in-house companies who are designed to have their products auctioned on DealDash.
2. Since DealDash controls the retail pricing of these products they can market them as “luxury” items worth an excessive amount. This leads to elevated Buy It Now prices.
3. Smart users take advantage of the high Buy It Now prices to win auctions below that threshold so that they can exchange them to increase their bid pool.
4. Everyone else who may actually be interested in buying the products has to compete with users (with nearly unlimited free bids) who are bidding only to increase their bids.
5. Buying the item at Retail price to get your bids returned is a sham. The products are worth nowhere near their Buy It Now prices and nobody does or should use that feature. People who lose auctions lose all their bids and that goes directly into DealDash’s profits.

Put it all together and the average DealDash user will find themselves out of a lot of money with nothing but a beginner auction beanie to show for it.

Is there anything that can be done?

DealDash has tried to remedy this somewhat with their No Exchange auctions. I don’t see those any more, and I wouldn’t expect them to keep it up. Take away the exchange for bids option and the whole profit system falls apart. It might also reveal the secret that their most active users are exchanging instead of buying.

There’s really only one way to win.

How to be a Shark on Deal Dash

If you can’t beat them, join them. Learn from the big players on how they are able to win auction after auction with the least amount of bids. You can go through each of the auctions they participate in and how they won. Learn which auctions have the best return, which other users to avoid, and when to admit defeat. Even the best don’t win every time.

All the statistics and tools you need to win are right here on LetsGoBidding.com. It’s completely, and always will be free.

Go ahead, sign up, buy your first bid pack, use one bid to buy the highest Buy It Now priced item you can get from a beginner auction. Then exchange it for more bids. Keep using your bids to win more auctions you can exchange for more bids. Soon you’ll have enough bids pooled up that you can try to get one of the serious items: A new Iphone, or even a car. But more likely you will lose out on every auction to other players doing the same thing, and they’ve already got a lot more bids than you.

Most people who have only seen the commercial won’t know all this. For them, Deal Dash is one big scam and they’re going to lose everything they put in. But if you use these tips, you might be able to waste a huge amount of time to get a slightly reduced price consumer good that you don’t need. Deal Dash may not be illegal, but it’s definitely a scam. It’s shady capitalism that only the few and resourceful can take advantage of.

Don’t bother signing up, you will only lose in the end.

*I have never signed up for Deal Dash and have never given them any money or received any money from them.

DealDash.com is a bidding site that requires a good deal of skill and knowledge to excel at. Since I discovered UncleTan has been beating the system for all these years, I realized we need a new metric to gauge users to see who is bidding effectively and who is wasting bid after bid. Use this scoring to see who on Dealdash is the best at winning auctions while spending the least amount of bids. Then, since you can look at each user’s bid history, you can look back to figure out how they are doing it. With this information, you can either learn from it, or avoid bidding against them in the future.

How the Metric Works

To put it simply the lower their ELO score the better they are at winning auctions with fewer bids. The complete algorithm is:

 1000 * (Number_of_all_bids_made / Buy_It_Now_Dollar_amont_of_all_auctions_won)

Each auction has a Buy It Now price. For example, a 1000 bid pack has a Buy It Now price of $600. If someone new to Deal Dash wins a 1000 bid pack auction with 300 bids, then their ELO would be

1000 * (300/ $600) = 500

They won this auction with significantly fewer bids (300) than the Buy It Now Price (600) this gives a good low ELO sore. The score takes into account all recent auctions a user has participated in, even auctions they didn’t win, and sums up all the bids. It will only change gradually and reflects the overall performance of a user.

If someone has a 0 ELO then that just means there isn’t enough information yet to evaluate their raking.

Why this matters

Anyone with an ELO score of less than 1000 is on average winning auctions with less bids than the Buy It Now price. Most auctions you can “exchange” after winning for bids equal to the Buy It Now price. This means anyone with less than a 1000 ELO is likely a skilled user who is gaming the system to avoid paying for bids, like UncleTan. Anyone with a higher than 1000 ELO needs to continuously purchase more bids to stay in auctions.

Even though UncleTan is the most prolific DealDash user, he is not the best. Below is a perpetually up-to-date list of the current Deal Dash “winners”. Every one of these users, in theory, has unlimited bids. They can reliably win auctions and then exchange their wins for more bids than they spent on the original auction! If you’re serious about your penny bidding, then you will want to be on this list.

The 100 Most Efficient Deal Dash Users

There is one regular user on DealDash who appears to bid on nearly everything, and usually wins. He is UncleTan and he has won literally millions of dollars worth of auctions.

Since this site has a great deal of historical auction data, it’s easy for me to go back and analyze how UncleTan has become the best DealDash bidder, by a large margin.

First, some statistics.

UncleTan Wins half of all auctions he participates in. Which is impressive considering he doesn’t put down that many bids on each auction. He’s also won well over 6,600 times. Actually, probably quite a lot more. I only have statistics going back a year or so and he has been bidding since 2012.

You can see all this information and his recently won auctions on UncleTan user statistics page, but I wanted to dig deeper to really figure out what sets him apart.

First, I tried to figure out what he is doing with his winnings. Either he has a warehouse full of crap he won or he’s selling the thousands of products he’s winning.

I searched on ebay and google for anyone selling any DealDash specific merchandise. Bolvaint, Wilcott Weaves, and Kamikoto are some of the UncleTan’s favorite brands and are generally only purchased new from DealDash. I found very little. no one is selling these products at the scale required based on how quickly he is winning them.

There is a third option, one which has an insane implication.

He is exchanging every one of his winning auctions for more bids.

Every time you win an auction on DealDash, you have two weeks to either pay the auction price or exchange the item for bids. The bids are typically the Buy It Now Dollar amount but can be slightly less depending on how DealDash calculates a fair ratio.

This is one of the ways to get free bids from DealDash. The question is if UncleTan can use this method to perpetually receive free bids. To do this we have to compare the number of bids UncleTan is putting down with the Buy It Now prices of the auctions he is winning. This will give a good estimate to see if he is consistently able to win auctions by putting down less bids than the Buy-It-Now’s dollar amount.

For example, if he could win a watch with a $100 Buy It Now price with only 50 bids then he could exchange it for bids and end up with 50 MORE bids than before he entered the auction.

I looked at the last 1000 auctions UncleTan has participated in and added up all the bids he made and the cumulative sum of the Buy It Now Price for each auction he won.

Total Bids Made: 580,708
Sum of Buy It Now Prices: $967,699

It’s as I expected. UncleTan is consistently winning auctions by 60% of the Buy It Now price. This means on average he can win an auction with 60 bids and exchange it for 100. He has an infinite free bid generation machine.

How does he do this?

I think there are a couple factors that help UncleTan win by placing less bids than anyone else.

First he chooses his auctions carefully: Often he will pick auctions with the largest margin between the average auction selling price and the buy it now price. Lately he’s been heavily hitting the various Wilcott Weaves rugs, each has a Buy It Now price in the thousands and frequently has an ending auction price of $20 or less. Finding smart auctions like this makes it easier to receive more free bids than you send out.

Secondly, UncleTan has a reputation on DealDash. Anyone who’s spent a small amount of time on DealDash.com knows that he is a high roller. If you’re in an auction against only him there’s a very good chance you are going to lose. Often he will bid far more for an item than it is worth. This dissuades anyone from joining the auction if they see he is bidding in it, which causes the auction to end sooner than it otherwise would.

Is anyone else doing this?

I think some of the other big players are trying to do more or less the same thing, but less effectively. Each of these have a Buy-It-Now to Bid ratio of less than 100% which means they could be generating more bids by exchanging. maxwell44(64%), Podewiz(73%), TexasGMen(94%). You can see a complete list of skilled DealDash users who are gaming the system by learning about this site’s ELO rating.

What is this called?

As far as I know, no one else knows this is going on. I’m calling the process of using your bids to win auctions you don’t want so that you can exchange them for yet more bids: Farming.

In theory anyone can start bid farming on DealDash. You can do it easily if you use the free statistics on this site to find the best auctions for getting a higher return. I think it’s entirely possible to create an infinite bid generation system with only the bids in your first bid pack purchase.

With some luck you can be the next UncleTan and win whatever you like without every paying for bids again. Happy Bidding!

Think you’ll get that brand new iPhone for 69 cents?

Unlikely. But you could pick up a fancy iPhone case for under a buck.

Here are some of the names you’ll find in the lower-priced tier of products on DealDash. With careful bidding you could pick up many of these items for next to nothing.

Ashlynn Avenue

Honestly, about half of the list of 100 products is made up of Ashlynn Avenue jewelry. Good luck finding anything about whatever company makes these or where they come from. If it’s gold, it’s gold plated. Nothing they make is worth more than $12 on eBay so if you can pick it up for under a buck that’s a great deal.

Verdict Phone Cases and Clothes

Another company you probably never heard of. You can get Cheap phone cases from the iPhone 6 and up. Again these aren’t really worth any more than $12 and often a lot less, so if you’re spending more than a buck on one of these, you’re getting ripped off. Luckily it’s easy to pick up one of these for under $1. Verdict also has some clothing like hats and underwear if you’re into keeping your body covered by synthetic fibers.

Bid Packs

Use bids to get more bids? Sure why not.

100 bid packs are the easiest to get for under a dollar. About a quarter of all auctions end at less than $1. As the size of the bid packs increases the inverse happens to your chance of nabbing it at a good price. 800 bid packs sell under $1 only 6% of the time, and forget about anything bigger.

Gift Cards

The gift cards that typically sell for under a buck are also most often used to buy the other sub-dollar items from companies you never heard of, only at retail price. that $50 Barrel Shack gift card is worth about $1 since Barrel Shack products are generally worth 1/50th of their retail price. But it’s not a bad idea to get these if you wanted to exchange them for Free bids.

And without further Ado, below is the continuously updated list of the most popular auctions selling for less than $1 during the previous month.

DealDash is a penny auction site that requires you to pay money for each bid you place on items. You are paying money regardless if you win the auction or not. There are several ways you can receive free bids, either with coupon codes, doing specific things online for Dealdash, or just by bidding.

There is a caveat, if you’re hoping to bid on items for free without first paying for bids then you are going to be disappointed. There simply is no way to get free bids without first putting in your credit card (or paypal) and paying for your first bid pack. In this way you’re really just diluting the cost of your bids by mixing in free bids with your paid ones. Use these tips and you will have a significant amount of bids at an overall low price, but it is impossible to use DealDash without first paying for a starter bid pack.

Use a DealDash Free Bids code

Get 100 free bids to use on DealDash when you purchase your first bid pack by clicking Our promotional DealDash link and using the promo code “best-penny”. This saves you at least $12 in bids!

Check DealDash’s Facebook Page

DealDash regularly updates their Facebook Page with offers and promotions. Mostly it’s a list of new expensive products they are auctioning off but occasionally they also have competitions or social media tasks for you to do to get free bids on your account. Usually it’s something simple such as liking or commenting on their content. They might also want you to take a picture or video of yourself enjoying the fruits of DealDash.com.

Fill Out Your Bio

There’s an ongoing promotion on DealDash where you get an extra 3 bids by typing something into the bio section of your profile. Just put whatever you want in there as long as it’s friendly and follows the rules. It will have to go through review first before you get your bids which might take a little while.

Get Free Bids by Being the Highest Bidder

DealDash.com has a feature where you get free bids while you bid called “Time as highest bidder”. Basically, you fill up a bar by being the top bidder in an auction. Each bid can only be highest bidder for a maximum of 10 seconds until you either win, or someone else places a bid. The speed the bar fills up depends on the multiplier, which changes from day to day. You only get your free bids when the bar is filled. The amount of free bids you receive depends on your “level” which goes up each time the bar is filled.

There’s a few strategies to get the most out of “Time as highest bidder”.

• Only bid on days with multiplier. A 4x or 5x multiplier will fill your bar and level you up much faster than the common 2x day.
• Avoid bidding on popular auctions early on. When you bid on an auction early, you’re less likely to be highest bidder for the full 10 seconds before someone else places a bed. Wait until the auction is established and everyone is using their Bid Buddy to automatically place bids.

Win Easy Products You Don’t Want and Exchange Them for Bids

There are many auctions on DealDash you can win with very few or even 1 bid. They’re typically low value gift cards, clothing, jewelry, and other items DealDash clearly has a surplus of. After you win one of those auctions you can go to the Pay For It Now page and you get the choice to either pay the auction price or return the item in exchange for bids. The number of of bids you receive is usually the same as the “Buy it now” price in dollars. If you win an auction worth $50 with a single bid, you can convert your one bid into 50 free ones! There may be a limit to how much you can do this as many items you can only win once.

”Buy It Now” auctions you lost to get your bids back

You get all your bids you spent on an auction back for “free” if you buy the product at retail price. Keep in mind the retail price you’d pay to buy the product is often much more than what it could be bought on Amazon or Ebay. The bids you get back might not even be worth the difference in price, but if you did accidentally put in way more bids for an auction than you should have than this can be an easy way to get those bids back.

The Easiest Way to Get Free Bids

You get all the free bids you want when you use a different site that always lets you bid for free. DealDash is a risky business and you could end up spending more on bids than what you get back in products. There are plenty of other auction sites where you can get great deals and the bids are free, such as Ebay or Tophatter. Keep in mind that DealDash is just something to have a little fun with if you don’t mind spending spare money. DealDash is competitive and many high-roller players will throw down thousands of bids on an auction without blinking, so be wary and just remember to have fun!