$5 Louboutins?!?!

I just read an article about an online auction site where a pair of Louboutins worth $682 sold for only $5.46 and a Marc Jacobs purse worth $456 sold for $12.36. I asked the same thing you probably are, what's the catch? The catch is that this website oohilove.com is a penny auction site. These seem to be cropping up everywhere. All the products that get sold on these sites start at very low prices, usually under $1. Users of these sites must purchase bid packs in order to bid on these items, this site seems to charge $0.99 a bid. Each time someone bids on an item, that item's auction time gets extended by 30 seconds and the price increases by $0.02. So, even if the item sells for say $5.46 like this pair of Louboutins did, it could have cost that user much more than that in the number of bids that user placed. There are also all the users that paid to place bids on that item and ended up with nothing because they decided it was no longer worth it to them to continue bidding. Although this article offers a few tips on how to increase your chances of winning, they seemed like common sense to me. In fact, they may become counterproductive if everyone uses the same logic to try to win. I think this is just a way for these companies to make people psychologically think they're getting a good deal when in reality there are actually probably very few people that actually do. The vast majority probably will spend a small fortune before ever winning anything. Too bad though because I could sure go for a pair of $5 Louboutins.