The suspects in the case are being accused of contacting different timeshare owners and offering them lucrative terms in buying their timeshare, promising to pay them much more than the owners thought they would be able to get for the timeshare. Then the scam artists would tell the timeshare owners that there was a small transfer fee and several small taxes, all of which do not actually exist.  After they would pay these fees, the scammers would split and were never heard from again.

The area in Spain where most timeshares that were involved in the scam were located

The timeshare properties of course never actually changed hands once and the men were not heard from until they would all regroup to begin another scam in another area. Authorities eventually arrested 23 German men, one Polish suspect, and one Swiss suspect last week.

With the assistance of the German Embassy in Madrid, detectives were able to find the suspects, who were mostly located on the Tenerife Island. The men are currently facing up to six years in prison if they are in fact convicted of the fraud.

Many owners have tried to sell their property, usually finding depressed prices, not the lucrative terms that the suspects allegedly offered to the German timeshare owners which is the biggest reason why timeshare owners are so often scammed in this way.

The couple paid $9,100 for their timeshare in the year 2008 for a timeshare with Concepts Vacation Club with Garraway Enterprises and has recently been interested in getting out of the timeshare for financial reasons. But, when the couple received their call from D.R.I., they were told that the timeshare property was now worth $28,000 and that they would help them resell the timeshare.

A woman who identified herself as a legal counsel for D.R.I, Katrina Moss, said that they were in fact a legal firm and very legitimate. The company did eventually prove to be yet another “bogus law firm” making cold calls to investors and telling them that their timeshare had accrued value and that if they sold with them, they would become very rich. Of course most timeshare owners today now that the timeshare industry has been struggling for several years now and it is highly unlikely for any timeshare to be going up in value in today’s downturned economy.

Nevertheless, D.R.I. was successful in claiming themselves to be a highly respected law firm and getting the Cheangs to place a $500 deposit with them as well as another $7,000 to be paid later. This is apparently one of the newest trends in the old timeshare resale scam market and timeshare owners should be very weary.  According to the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority, D.R.I. used to also be known as Gina’s Peranakan Restaurant & Pub, an interesting piece of trivia.

Case executives are saying that while there have only been a few cases of parties claiming to be lawyers or from a law firm in order to gain reputability and then tell timeshare owners they need a deposit in order for them to sell their timeshare for a huge profit. The timeshare industry has topped CASE’s complaints list for the past six years running.  From just January to November, they have seen 1,844 timeshare cases.

While it has been no secret that many timeshare resale companies advertising that they will sell your timeshare for you or any other timeshare related scams have been around for quite some time, the couple’s experience is a perfect example of how these approaches are varying.

List of companies in Singapore that European trade body for timeshare, the Resort Development Organisation, has received complaints against.

- Services Pte Ltd.

- Vision Solutions

- I- Generic Pte. Ltd.

- Worldex Asia

- Worldex Pte. Ltd.

- Asian Travel Group

- Holiday Plus

- Hayward Ventures Ltd.

- Garraway Enterprises

- Colonial Strategies

- River Marketing Ltd.

- Beaufort Park

- St. George Group

- Global Securities

- Colonial Securities

- Mgi Luxury Pte

- United Wealth Management

TATOC - A non-profit timeshare association started in 1989 to safeguard timeshare ownership.

The Timeshare Association, also known as TATOC, said today that the consumer helpline run out of their headquarters in Manchester saw their largest number of complaints in regards to timeshares this year.

January of 2009 was their previous highest recorded number of phone call complaints with an impressive 691 calls in just that month alone. Since then, TATOC has reportedly received more and more calls each month and in January of 2010, they received a total of 797 phone calls from people who were upset about the timeshare industry.

CEO of the Timeshare Association, Mr. Harry Taylor, went on record to say that, “The helpline has been really busy and the service we provide is proving invaluable to confused owners and consumers.” Indeed, these services are necessary as the timeshare industry has seen a substantial downturn since the year 2007 when sales began to rapidly decline. Since then, the timeshare industry has shrunk by more than 50%.

The company also reported that their average phone call length was an extensive 24 minutes meaning that most likely, people were not calling in with simple inquiries that could be easily explained.  The association is a much needed help to the different Attorney Generals around the country who, up to now, have been hearing the blunt of the continuing and troubling complaints that even report some people are saying that they are calling from the Attorney General’s Office themselves!

The Timeshare Association, a non-profit limited company, was formed in 1989 and is the only consumer association that is elected and represents the interests of timeshare owners. TATOC’s mission is to safeguard the timeshare experience for existing and potential users.

Timeshare Company Resolve Marketing's home office

In one of Great Britain’s leading publications, The Daily Mail, today was an article selected as “Readers’ Champion” about one couple’s meeting with a timeshare company called Resolve Marketing.

A man who refers to himself as B.J.T. tells his story of a chance meeting with the Marketing company and Bavington Consultants Limited where they chatted about selling the timeshare he owned with his wife.

They told him that Bavington was an agent for a Manx Company, Telos, that was going to build a new and luxurious hotel in Cornwall and told us that we would get £3,500 for the unwanted timeshare in our possession if we invested in the new hotel. They told us that all we had to was simply place a small down payment on my wife’s MasterCard and when they took our card, allegedly to check it, they came back saying that the entire deal had gone through and we had been charged a total of £2,995.

We soon left after the pressure sale and realized that we would need to mortgage our home if we did not get our money back, but as you probably expected, we were unable to do so. The only thing we knew at this point was that we had to find a way to get our money back.

Armed with no other information aside from this, the couple began their search. First, they found that Resolve Marketing was nothing more than a website and the phone number on the site did not appear to work any longer. After reporting this information to The Daily Mail, they began to do some investigating.

They started by contacting Bavington, who was not legally allowed to charge the credit card without reaching an agreement to do so with the client. With this information, the publication contacted HSBC, the credit card issuer, and they agreed that inappropriate unauthorized action had taken place and therefore, would be refunding the money back to the couple’s account.

Now several of the men behind Bavington, such as John Wiseman, Maurice O’Sullivan, and Spencer John Golding have been court ordered and face mounting charges. When approached for comments, Wiseman simply said, “We do not advise people on the suitability of a business transaction. We act as agents for the developer and introduce them to the opportunity.”

To avoid timeshare resale scams, go with a timeshare transfer company that is open and has a strong track record like Transfer America

However, if you are insistent upon trying to sell your timeshare, there are a few required documents that you should have before you speak to anyone.

1. The first and probably most-expected document you will need in order to sell your timeshare or any piece of expensive real estate is your proof of residency. In this case you would just use your social security number, but you obviously can’t just rattle the number off so you would want to actually either bring your social security card or your birth certificate.

2. The second document you need to sell a timeshare is the Earnest Money Contract. This is the contract that details the exact information of the timeshare. This includes the address of the timeshare, the resort that it is a part of, as well as other crucial pieces of information.

3. The last necessary document needed to sell a timeshare is the actual timeshare deed itself. To transfer a deed out of your name, you will need to have the signatures of anyone who is currently on the deed to sign over to the buyer.

After you have sold your timeshare, you will complete a deed of sale document that shows that the timeshare deed has in fact changed hands. After you receive a deed of sale, your timeshare is no longer in your name and has been successfully transferred to someone else.

Beware of timeshare companies promising deals that sound too good to be true.

      Prosecutors in Florida have indicted a third man for the enormous scam that was going on pertaining to the timeshare telemarketing scam that just ended by Attorney General Bill McCollum.

      These men combined are allegedly responsible for stealing over a million dollars from timeshare owners who were operating under the impression that they were working with a company that was going to be helping them get some money back after being scammed by a timeshare company. Michael Lentine, Michael Satarace, and now Darnell Disroe, have been using telemarketing to call timeshare owners in their homes to tell them that if they had been scammed by other companies who told them that they could help them get rid of their timeshare, they could.

      The men from Boynton Beach and Lantana were running the company called Real Timeshare Marketing and with this company, the men called people from all over the country and told them that they were working on behalf of the state attorney general. They would tell people that they had found buyers for their timeshare and told them that the only thing they had to pay was a closing cost. They took the people’s money and then never got back in touch with them.

     There of course were no buyers or potential buyers even and Real Timeshare Marketing simply kept the money. It is reported that just since December 1^st, 2009, the company has scammed over a net of $1.3 million from 615 victims in 46 states and Canada.

Timeshare Relief ranks on the Fastest Growing List two years running

     The timeshare company Timeshare Relief, which specializes in getting timeshare owners who are no longer happy with their timeshare out of their timeshare contracts, has just been named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s coveted Fastest Growing Private Companies for the year 2010.

     Every year, the celebrated trade magazine compiles a list of the top 100 private companies that are headquartered in Los Angeles County. This list is composed of companies based off increased percentage of their total revenue over the course of the two previous years, in the case of the 2010 list, the years 2007 to 2009. The companies are then ranked and listed in order with their revenue percentage increase, number of employees (in L.A. County and out), the number (in millions) that the company made the past three years, and their ranking in last year’s list if relevant. Timeshare Relief ranked 30^th last year.

     Timeshare Relief, as reported by the Los Angeles Business Journal brought in 45.8 million dollars last year in total revenue and this year, has increased that by 86.9 percent. The only timeshare company on the list, Timeshare Relief and its affiliate companies have helped families get out of more than 58,000 timeshares since the year 2004 when the company was started by David MacMillan and his wife Cindy Martin MacMillan in their living room.

     The list reflects the ongoing ecommerce trend with many of the companies either having exclusively an online presence or helping others create an online presence in the form of online marketing or the like. Topping the list year is the company BackJoy Orthotics LLC in the number one position, Central Desktop Inc. in the number two, and Hometown Telecom in position number three.

The two men, Kevin Bates and Anthony Passaro are both managers for Inbound Marketing Advisors and Fortune Property Management & Investments respectively. They are being charged first and foremost for charging their clients an upfront fee of around $1,500 which they claimed would be going toward recovering their money that they lost when they paid other companies who promised that they would sell their timeshare for them.

These two companies were operating under several different names as well so as to get as much money from consumers as possible. The other names for these companies were American Recovery Task Force and National Recovery Task Force and these two were being run in Boca Raton and Delray Beach respectively.

The scam that the men are running is as thus. They bought the list of contacts from other timeshare resale companies that claimed they were going to get people out of their timeshares, took their money, and then did nothing. They then began calling these people and telling them that they would be able to recoup their lost money back from these companies so long as they pay another small, upfront fee. While these men were making out their calls, they claimed that they were actually working with the attorney general’s office says McCollum, who is now trying to get the men and their companies brought to justice.

When they were making their calls, Bates, Passaro, and those working for them told their potential clients that they were working on behalf of the attorney general’s office and that they had given them the names to help them get the refunds that they were entitled to. These two companies have taken millions of dollars from consumers using deceitful practices and McCollum has begun taking action. McCollum has just begun seeking injunctions, restitutions, and civil penalties in between $10,000 and $15,000 to each violated timeshare owner. McCollum is also attempting to immediately dissolve both companies as well.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently reported that the number of complaints in regards to the timeshare resale industry have tripled since 2008, a staggering statistic considering how well the industry appeared to be doing before that. Most of these reported cases were about businesses charging timeshare owners fees upfront, before they so much as lifted a finger. Because so many timeshare owners out there today are desperate to get rid of these expensive long-term contracts in this struggling economy, they were quick to accept any offers for help without asking the right questions.

The Task Force behind the Better Business Bureau urges timeshare owners who looking to get out of their timeshare to be wary of working with a company that says that they have either already sold your timeshare for you, or that they are certain that they can sell your timeshare before taking an adequate amount of time to look at the timeshare deed itself.

Some typical examples of the growing timeshare problem:

- June A man in the state of Texas reported that he used a timeshare resale company and gave them over $6,000 to sell his timeshare for him. The company promised that they had buyers for him, but ultimately just took his money and did nothing. The company told the man that their office’s address was that of a vacant and dilapidated office building in downtown St. Louis.

- July In Missouri, a grand jury returned federal indictments against three separate companies that used telemarketing schemes that targeted timeshare owners throughout the entire United States. The U.S. attorney’s office has said that the company scammed more than $1.3 million dollars from 615 customers in 46 states and even Canada.

- September Because of a huge crackdown on the timeshare industry in Florida, the state with the largest number of timeshares, seven companies have been closed and four people have been arrested. One of these companies was International Resort Sellers LLC, who had their address listed in Westport entertainment and office complex in northwest St. Louis County which was designed just to mislead the public and elude investigators.

Timeshare fraud has been feeding off of the weak economy and lack of timeshare sales of the past two years and many victims have begun reporting it to law enforcement officials and to the Better Business Bureau. Many reported believing their company was legitimate because of smooth talking sales representatives. The BBB warns timeshare owners interested in getting out of their timeshare to make sure and ask the right questions of the company they are going to use before handing over any money. Make sure the company has a strong BBB rating, has been around for a while, can provide testimonials from previous customers, has an address you can confirm, and is not telling you that you have to do the deal that day or it goes away. For further questions, contact your state BBB.

Consumer Alert – Barclays Sterling Ltd & CAS Consumer Arbitration Services
GoTimeshare.org
Timeshare owners should be on their guard if contacted by either Barclays Sterling Ltd & CAS Consumer Arbitration Services, both of which have been brought …

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