Timeshare Fraud Costs Many Life Savings In UK

Our Comments: Even though this took place in Europe, it illustrates how you can be taken more than once when dealing with timeshare units. Never buy a timeshare from someone that cold calls and thoroughly research any vacation resort that you are considering purchasing a timeshare unit with. Do your research as thoroughly as if you were purchasing a new house, or even more...

***********************************

“It is too early to say how many Britons are affected, but it is likely to run into the thousands. Many people affected by this scam will have lost their life savings.” Unofficial police estimates put the total number of victims at about 15,000...

Police said that potential customers would be asked to buy into fictitious timeshare properties or would be sold package holidays that did not exist. The gang is also alleged to have employed sales staff to call time-share owners and offer to sell their annual holiday allowance for them, then asked them for administration fees and taxes for work that would never be completed...

A spokesman for the Spanish National Police, who made the arrests, said: “They would get sales staff to cold-call time-share owners in places like the UK and offer to buy their annual holiday allowance, then dupe them into transferring money to Spain to cover things like solicitors’ costs and administrative fees after securing an initial agreement.

“Several months would often go by before people realised they had been the victims of a fraud and there had been no resale.”

He continued: “The fraudsters even used false documents to offer to undertake legal action against other fraudulent companies they also ran, defrauding many victims twice in the process... Entire Article