So you get a cold call from someone claiming to have a waiting buyer for your timeshare week for sale. You placed an advert on the internet ‘timeshare for sale’, ‘buy my timeshare’, ’selling my timeshare’, whatever…
The person makes a claim that they can sell your timeshare week for what you are asking, or a figure very close to it, minus their small agents’ commission of course. Being as the market for timeshare resales is very small, this alone should set the alarm bells ringing.
Next comes even more lies:
They will say that they are an ‘approved’ timeshare resales company or bonafide real estate agent, with credentials such as assoication membership. They may even give you their lawyers telephone number and sometimes they will even have a slick website ready for you to find when you start to check them out.
The telephone numbers thay they give you to check will be often be mobile numbers, answered by one of their colleagues in their own sales office! They may also send over a contract which appears to have the name and a signature of a buyer. This contract is a fabrication and even good lawyers have been taken in by them.
You will know for sure that everything up to now has been false when they then ask for an up-front payment, usually ranging from around US$300 to US$3,000. They will state the reason for this payment as to cover legal fees, to cover sales fees, a legal requirement, registration of the deeds, a banking transfer requirement and so on, none of which are true.
The most credible sounding ones, particularly in Europe, will even invite you to their offices to sign the transfer documents and collect your money from the buyer. What happens is that you get sucked in to a very slick sales presentation where you end up parting with even more cash and buy a membership of some holiday club or other along with a ‘cashback’ promise for 3 to 5 years time, something that is almost certainly an empty promise.
They may even tell you that, as a victim of an earlier fraud, you will get back the money you paid (and even some of the money that the fraudsters had promised from the sale of your timeshare). All you have to do is pay a fee now. The caller may well be the same person who defrauded you the first time!
In some versions of this timeshare resales scam, timeshare owners have even be caught out by calls from a ‘bank’ claiming to be holding some money for them. The ‘bank’ says that as soon as your ‘transfer fee’ is paid, they will release your money.
One of the worst things that you can do is fall for the scam whereby you trade in your timeshare week for membership of a holiday club - and pay a fee - then find out at a much later date that your timeshare week has not been transferred, leaving you with the maintenance charges to pay on top of any charges for your new holiday club.
They may pretend to be calling from the UK or the US ” even giving a relevant telephone number ” but are mostly calling from Spain or the Canaries using a call transfer or an international mobile number. But some ARE calling from the UK or USA and they are just as dangerous as those calling from overseas. These companies are acting fraudulently. They are VERY convincing and VERY persistent.
NEVER send any money to any company on the promise of selling your timeshare ” whatever reason they might give you for paying and certainly do not give them your credit/debit card details. NEVER send an ownership certificate, or even a copy of one. Let your lawyer deal with all that.
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