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News of a third party lead generator has come to our attention. Apparently, the caller is using the well worn scare tactic of telling ex-timeshare owners that they are not really out of their timeshare ownership and will be invoiced for all the back maintenance fees, an inbound enquiry set us off investigating:

“We had a fractional timeshare which we purchased in 2013. My wife suffers from ill health and was unable to travel. We mutually agreed to surrender our membership in 2017 and thought that was the end of the matter. However, we had an unsolicited phone call from a lady saying that we were still on their books and that CLC could claim 6 years maintenance fees from us even though since we surrendered our fraction we have had no contact whatsoever from CLC or any requests to pay any maintenance fees to them. The lady said that they would get ‘Harwood Advisory Group’ to contact us for a free Zoom conversation today. I noticed that this firm is on a list of ‘Scammers’ is this correct please?”

From this comment, it’s plain to see that this enquirer is well and truly out of Club la Costa ownership, but not according to the scammers.

TCA investigation

We have no idea who the lead generator is but are pretty sure they are one of the same with Harwood Advisory. Third party lead generators are used to clean data in order to become General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) compliant. The lead generator has no legal right to call you, however, if you agree to your details being passed over for the “Zoom” call, then GDPR is satisfied.

We will start with the company; Companies House does indeed show a record that Harwood Advisory Group Ltd is registered, the sole Director is quoted as Amy Victoria Goddard, however, this is where the problems begin. According to Companies House, the company only came into being on 8th February 2023.

The address quoted for the company is Gemini House, 136-140 Old Shoreham Road, Hove, England, BN3 7BD, according to Endole Suite, this address has 283 companies registered which makes us believe this is either a virtual office or simply a correspondence address, our suspicions were confirmed by Google Maps:

The sign outside clearly shows the words “Business Centre” these sorts of buildings offer co working, office rental by the hour, day, week etc, below is some explanatory text taken from marketing for this address:

“Gemini business centre provides versatile office accommodation in self-contained offices ranging from 136 to 2500 sq ft. There are 31 offices in a diverse business community with a staffed reception facility and a fully inclusive pricing policy on our smaller units. Terms are flexible meaning you can simply walk in and start work without the responsibility of a long term commitment.”

Back to Endole, there are 283 companies working from 31 offices, must be a little crowded!

Turning to the contact telephone quoted on the website, our research discovered the following:

“Ofcom records show that numbers starting 01273 004 are protected from allocation. Where numbering capacity has been withdrawn from service, the block or code is sterilised for a period, typically 2 years. Alternatively, the Ofcom Numbering Unit might protect capacity for a limited period, to avoid dialling errors into similar codes”

To be honest, this is a of bit gobbledygook but it appears that these numbers cannot be allocated, indicating that the numbers have been created by an offshore Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) provider.

We now move onto the website, much similar to the company, the domain name was only registered on 9th February 2023. The website is a simple one page affair; of interest are the services the company provide:

Rather odd for a company that purports to assist timeshare owners that there’s not a mention of timeshare insight. As an aside, you will notice that one of the services is website content analysis; TCA would suggest that they start this service with their own site. Three legal requirements for all websites are; published terms and conditions, a privacy policy and a cookie opt out option, all of which are missing. We mentioned earlier that there was no mention of timeshare, the list above seems to indicate what they do, but what is their raison d’être?

So from the above we can see accounting and tax services, financial planning and business consulting are specialities, but how does this fit in with cancelling timeshare, may we add, in this case, a timeshare that’s already been cancelled. We also see the company has gained a reputation for providing “exceptional” service and value to its clients, our question would be; how many clients could have possibly benefited from this exceptional service in slightly over three months of the company’s existence?

TCA comment

TCA comment

Once again this all started with a cold call, how many more times do we have to say, this is the first red flag. There is little to add beyond our investigation and the facts above. The “are you in or out” scam is reaching pandemic proportions. Let’s look at some hard facts, in this case we are talking CLC, now under GDPR, the only people who should know that you own, or did own a timeshare with CLC, is you, CLC and possibly anyone else YOU chose to share that information with. Absolutely no one else should be privy to your details.

The scammers will tell you that you are on the central register of timeshare owners, let us say and put this to bed once and for all, NO SUCH REGISTER EXISTS, please read our article here entitled:

Welcome to the official timeshare registry that doesn’t exist!

Finally, we refer back to our enquirer and one particular comment “My wife suffers from ill health and was unable to travel” So here we have a couple who have been forced into giving up their timeshare due to ill health. No doubt the wife’s condition gives the husband continued cause for concern but that matters not a jot to these fraudsters, they don’t care about the stress in the family or the even greater stress that will be caused by paying multi thousands for a job that’s already done. Morals and ethics seem to be two words scammers don’t understand. As the old saying goes:

There’s no honour amongst thieves

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