As many of our recent articles have pointed out, scammers are referring to a fictitious register of timeshare owners which we say categorically doesn’t exist. As these scammers are getting more and more sophisticated, to stop organisations such as the TCA telling the truth, they have invented the register and made it public, well sort of.
Thanks to a savvy ex timeshare owner who was cold called with the usual scam, although he terminated his timeshare legally with the developer, he still owned, or so he was told. He was shown a website that confirmed he was still an owner. Luckily for us, he took a screen shot of the domain and passed it over for investigation, so investigate we did.
TCA investigation.
We will share the domain name with you shortly but first off when checking the domain we found it was only registered on 28th Aug 2022. This is odd as the site states the following:
Notice that the supposed information is obtained from trustee companies, that being the case trust companies obviously haven’t heard of the General Data Protection Regulations 2018 (GDPR) which would specifically prohibit the sharing of such information as this site implies.
Also rather odd that mere mortals are not allowed to enter the site but somehow the mere mortals at TCA managed it, without a user name or password. Our assumption is that 1999 is used as a start date because that’s the year that Spain introduced law 42/98 which opened the door to claims.
The home page or any other page for that matter are all void of any contact us details, there is no privacy policy or cookie allowance, both now legal requirements. Surely an international register which holds privileged personal information about timeshare owners must allow contact in case the data they hold is incorrect, obviously not.
How the site works
On the home page you are offered a geographic choice being USA, Europe and Asia. So you own in Europe and click the Europe photo, incidentally, a lovely picture of the canals in Venice complete with gondola. A further screen pops up:
Note the angle of the text does not match the angle of the screen and doesn’t fit the screen, anyway, Whoever coded the site couldn’t even be bothered to replace the standard WordPress logo with the site name:
Nit picking aside. If you click the search box, the following appears:
Out of the hundreds of timeshare developers in Europe Only MacDonald, Hilton, Diamond and Anfi appear, exit is not a developer and Slaley is a resort run by Seasons Holidays so not a developer.
Strangely enough, if you click USA or Asia, the same list appears.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Doesn’t matter which “developer “you click, the same result appears and rather weirdly for ownership at none of the above, but Club la Costa:
As you will notice on the right, membership is only “suspended” and outstanding money is critical, that’s where the scammers hang their hat. So if this site only shows a limited number of resorts and only the names of Mr & Mrs Mossop, how do the scammers magically come up with you?
Smoke and Mirrors
The best illusionists spend vast amounts of time preparing their act so that they can seamlessly fool their audience into believing that magic is real, so do the scammers. During a Zoom call the victim is shown an excerpt from the supposed register, this proves they are not out of their timeshare but are merely suspended.
All of us who use a PC or laptop will know that it’s possible to have multiple windows open at the bottom of the screen, which may be used at any time. The scammer will have prepared the victims registry entry before connecting to the video call. With sleight of hand worthy of David Copperfield or Dynamo “the reveal” shows that the victim is suspended and owes money, if done properly the supposed evidence is compelling.
TCA comment
We will once again state without fear of contradiction that there is no timeshare register of owners. As this information is supposedly obtained from the trustees, the largest of which is First National Trust Company (FNTC) based in the Isle of Man, if you don’t believe us, give them a call and ask if they share their ownership data.
This is yet another example of how sophisticated the scammers are getting to rob you of your hard earned money, like the illusionists we mentioned earlier, convincing though it is, it’s not magic just another lie.
We said we would share the domain name with you, see if you can find your own details, pound to a penny you will come up with the same results as we did.
CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE TEST
Now TCA has exposed this site for what it is, or rather isn’t, we wouldn’t be surprised if the domain name changes and the errors pointed out are corrected. The reality is that this doesn’t matter at all because as we have said hundreds of times and will repeat again, there is NO REGISTER OF TIMESHARE OWNERS, If you are shown this site or similar then you know that you are about to be defrauded so take our advice and terminate all contact. Your money is better off in your bank, not in the scammers.
Update
Within 24 hours of publishing this article, when trying to access the site you are met with this:
We predicted this in the article so one of two things may have happened, either the domain name has been changed or a proxy firewall has been implemented blocking all but those who have been granted access.
This action is really of no consequence as the fact remains the same; there is no registry of timeshare owners. The action reported here would confirm that fact. If the registry were real, the site would still be live, but it isn’t
For more information regarding this article or assistance in any other timeshare related issues please contact the TCA on 01908 881058 or email: info@TimeshareConsumerAssociation.org.uk