Hats off for the inventiveness of Spanish court case scammers, at the same time all in the TCA investigation team have only just recovered from fits of laughter over this one. On a serious note, those not in the know may easily fall for this one but there are so many pointers that confirm this as a scam and in the balance of this article we will point them all out, and try not to laugh whilst writing.
As is now the fashion, the cold call has been put aside in favour of the cold email, supposedly direct from the courts in Madrid.
The beginning
Well this one began in May last year when our enquirer made us aware of the scam, naturally having spoken to TCA, this one fell over at the first fence. Below we reproduce the first contact:
“Dear Mr & Mrs,
We are pleased to inform you on the success of the claim against Silverpoint Vacations SL and the following resorts which are part of Silverpoint: Club Paradiso, Beverly Hills Club, Heights, Hollywood Mirage among others.
The Spanish Supreme Court has handed down judgement rendering Silverpoint timeshare contracts in perpetuity void.
Your timeshare contract has been ruled as illegal as it is a forced contract stating the ownership of the timeshare forever (also called timeshare contracts in perpetuity). As a result, timeshare owners cannot surrender their contracts and they must pay maintenance fees all their lives. However, timeshare contracts in perpetuity are against the Spanish 42/1998 Act of Parliament. Thus every contract made after 1998 that does not include a 3-50 years term is null and void.
Please find below links to the press releases regarding Silverpoint Vacations SL criminal activity and the subsequent legal proceedings.
https://timeshareconsumerassociation.org.uk/2021/07/07/the-continuing-saga-of-silverpoint/
https://www.canarianweekly.com/posts/criminal-investigation-silverpoint-excel
Please find attached confirmation of your settlement.
We also understand that you were contacted by UK Transfer Security regarding a stop on the payment, due to the change in regulations, regarding the Foreign Assignee Document (F.A.D.) for Cross border litigation cases such as this where more than one country’s laws are involved.
For your information;
A Foreign Assignee Document (F.A.D.) must accompany any compensation amount that has been awarded by a European Court of Law.
The Foreign Assignee Document (F.A.D.) along with the compensation amount must be registered with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Our lawyers have your case file and will soon contact you to explain the full implications of how we proceed.
Kind regards
Maria Carlos
Tel: 0034 677 926 245”
Before we get into the bones of this, let’s look at the email address:
Here is the first big giveaway, @proton.me is an open source email platform such as Gmail or Hotmail, and no Spanish court would use such an address. The most likely address would have @madrid.org as a domain. Turning now to the contact telephone number, this appears as 0034 677 926 245, 0034 being the international code for Spain. After that, all Spanish telephone numbers that begin with either 6 or 7 are mobile phones, ask yourself, would a Spanish government body use mobile phones? The real number for a court in Madrid would begin with 9, as all Spanish landlines do. In this case, the number for the Supreme Court in Madrid is 0034 91 397 12 00.
It would take far too long for us to point out everything that’s wrong, suffice to say the entire content is rubbish. The other big giveaway is that there has been no case in the Supreme Court regards Silverpoint as a whole. Every case against Silverpoint is presented to the courts on an individual basis, therefore if the timeshare owner at Silverpoint has had no input at all, such as a statement of truth and has not employed the services of a Spanish lawyer to present the case then it’s a scam.
Before we move on, is it really believable that a Spanish court would put links in a communication of this sort to either TCA or a Canary Island newspaper?
The next step
Just because this enquirer turned down the first approach, doesn’t mean he has been removed from, what the scammers call, “the suckers list”. On the 6th February this year, the following email was received:
“Dear Mr & Mrs,
We have been contacted by Sandra Pennington in the Financial Transactions and Report Analysis Centre which is part of UK Remittance, regarding a stop placed on your account which is preventing them from releasing the award amount to you.
The Spanish bank that held your funds in escrow have placed an embargo on your settlement award due to unpaid bank fees. The fees due are 5% of the value of held funds, this equates to £3.139,80 / €3.670,40.
However, your funds have already been remitted to the UK for release, where they will be held for a period of 10 days maximum, after which time they will be recalled to Spain.
Please let me know how you would like to proceed but please be aware that there is a possibility of further charges should the funds be recalled to Spain.
You have 5 working days for movement on the account. If the bank does not hear from me during this time they will start the process for recalling the funds.
I have attached the banker’s draft from Cajamar which is where the funds were held in escrow. I will try to call you later or tomorrow regarding the embargo.
Un saludo
Mari-Carmen Colorados”
Let’s just have another look at the email address:
Our old friend @protonmail.com appears once again. Good try but there is no such UK Government body as the Financial Transactions and Report Analysis Centre neither is there UK Remittance. So the communication states that the remittance has already been sent to the UK for release and yet there is a contradictory statement that says the Spanish bank has imposed an embargo. Surely the Spanish bank would have imposed an embargo thereby not releasing the funds to a UK bank?
Reference is made to a bankers draft from Cajamar, who are indeed a Spanish bank; however it’s all fake, let’s take a look:
Once again, a Spanish mobile is quoted, 697 913 133 which is different from the other quoted above. Without doubt, these numbers are from, as the criminal world calls them, burner phones. Used for a while on a pay as you go basis then the sim card is destroyed, so at a stage in the future when the victim realises that they have been a sufferer of fraud, all they get when trying to contact is a dead phone, both money and scammers long gone.
Another glaring omission is any reference to the receiving bank. We have redacted the beneficiary information for privacy but have left the rest of this “fake” document untouched. No detail is here because whilst the scammer has details via stolen data of the Silverpoint timeshare, they have no details of the recipient’s bank account, thank goodness.
Further evidence
Going back to the original contact last year, a fake Spanish court document was sent, the header of which is shown below:
Here it shows the Madrid address of the court, except there is no court at that address, Juzgado, by the way, is the Spanish word for court. The address does in fact belong to Instituto Regional de Seguridad y Salud en el Trabajo which translates to Regional Institute of Safety and Health at Work, see Google map street view below:
The real court address and contact details are below:
Note the email address is not @proton.me but juzpriminstancia011madrid@madrid.org.
TCA comment
We are in no doubt that to the untrained eye, this all looks real and is pretty impressive, however as we have proved everything is fake and full of lies. If our enquirer had fallen for this he would have been £3,139 worse off with absolutely nothing to show.
Using mobile phones, fake email addresses and fake document quoting wrong addresses, what more could be wrong with this scam”, here’s the answer…
Once again we reiterate that if the first thing you know is that a court in Spain has awarded you a sum of money and you have had absolutely no input, then it’s a scam! Nowhere in the world do courts work that way. Specifically concerning Silverpoint, there has been no group court case in Spain, and likely there never will be.
If you receive what appears to be a “Spanish court document” and it doesn’t resemble the one below, then it’s a fake!
Silverpoint is in administration and investigations are still ongoing, so where did the court get their hands on, in this case, €61,187? They didn’t, So if they can’t get the money from Silverpoint, are we to believe that the Spanish Government have turned into a charity organisation and are paying out money to all the poor victims of Silverpoint, we’ll leave you to work that one out.
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