'Ron's Angel's Internet egg auction is a scam

Last week's launch of a Web site where the rich could bid for the eggs of models has been shown to be nothing but a scam thought up by an experienced purveyor of sex-related Web sites. According to Network Solutions Inc., the domain names for ronsangels.com and 14 sex sites are all linked to the California-based Ron Harris who may have successfully hoodwinked the world's media.

It appears that Harris, a playboy photographer and entrepreneur whose Ron's Angel's website featured eight women offering their eggs at up to £90,000 a time, banked on the outrage that his site would provoke among infertility groups, ethicists and commentators in order to generate publicity. This was so successful that Harris had over 5 million hits on his site in the first few days of its launch.

The supposed auction site charges $24.95 per month to access the full site, but the real revenue is likely to come from advertising banners, the success of which is usually measured in the number of site hits.

Asked in the Washington Times if Harris might just be trying to run up subscriptions for a new site, Bill Farley, a spokesman for Playboy for whom Harris had once worked, chuckled: 'It's a question that certainly crossed my mind. We don't have any use for this ourselves, of course, because we have the cloning facility under the mansion, where we just extract the DNA from the existing Playmates.'