Kauppalehti reports that Fiksuhuuto, the cent bidding website that we wrote about over here, is under police investigation due to possible misuse of the Finnish lottery law.

The Interior Ministry’s spokesperson Jouni Laiho has told Kauppalehti that they believe Fiksuhuuto is in the lottery business and due to this they are investigating the claim. We had a lot of debate about this last time in the comments and seems the government shares your views on this.

Update (@5.21 pm): Helsingin Sanomat reports, that the company has moved its headquarters to England and are running the company from a server on Malta.

Fiksuhuuto.fi is an online bidding company founded in early 2008 by Jussi Mäntylä and Tuomo Siurua. The idea behind the concept is simple yet unique. There are open bids on the website put up by the company. You purchase a right to bid for those products (priced between 1,90 and 0,84 euros). Every bid you make increases the price by one cent. Also, when you place your bid for the product the countdown to close the bid starts from the beginning. The coundowns are usually between one and two minutes.

Jussi and Tommi have filed a patent application for the idea. Currently they employ 12 people and ship around 100 products per day. If you calculate 30 bids per product (which is probably far too little), they would be getting somewhere around 3000 euros a day (on an average bid price of 1 euro) just for the bids.