Our Story is similar to so many we have read on the internet lately about El Cid Marina vacation club in Mazatlan. This is a beautiful place that should sell itself and no one should need to resort to underhanded tactics.
Unfortunately for us, like many others, we were scammed when we visited in July. We are Wyndham timeshare Gold members and although we knew that sales people will exaggerate the benefits, when it came to signing contracts we were always given the correct information by Wyndham.
This was not the case at El Cid. When we went for the breakfast meeting we were told that since we were gold members we were special and that we could join El Cid Vacation Club at no cost to us by trading in our Wyndham timeshare points. We were assured that we would still have all of our benefits and be able to reserve any Wyndham property 13 months in advance. After reading many blogs we suspect that isn't true but that is the least of our problems.
The big gun, Mr. Fernando Gonzalez came in with all sorts of verbal promises. We repeatedly told him that we could not afford any new payments and he assured us this was not the case since we were trading points and in fact he told us we would come out $6,000 USD ahead. (We owed $18,000 but now would only owe $12,000.) Other promises were cheaper airfare, hotels and cruises the whole enchilada.
We must have left our brains at home but somehow he convinced us that the credit card application was just a formality and nothing would be due for 6 months and by that time our timeshare with Wyndham would be traded.in fact he made it sound like El Cid was trading the timeshare and had already credited us our money.
We asked several times to clarify that we would have no payments for 6 months at which time everything would be traded so the only payment necessary would be on the $12,000 and again he assured us that this was true.
We signed the contracts and then went to another office to sign the disclosure forms. Although we were careless in our reading of the contract we did read the disclosure form very carefully.
The woman in that office then told us that to save paper they were putting the contract and other documents on a computer disk for us. She also informed us that t we had 5 days to change our minds but that we would lose our deposit which we now know is not true and at the time did not realized that our deposit was a $20,000 USD charge on the credit card.
We started to have questions but could not open the disk. We were told that Fernando was in Phoenix at the Mayo Clinic for colon problems but would call and talk to us. We have since read other accounts where he had other ailments such as Diabetes.) Needless to say, Fernando did not get back until the day we left.
Since we could not open our contract on the disk El Cid mailed us copies to our home. We retuned home only to discover that the disclosure form had been tampered with and it now read that we would start paying a monthly payment to El Cid beginning August 1. We then got the credit card billing for $20,000 plus a transaction fee of $600.00 and payments were due on August 11. This has turned into a nightmare. We are two people who never charge more than we can pay off the following month. We called the credit card company but they said they couldn't help.
We will now need to refinance our house to pay this off. We have contacted the Mexican government, PROFECO and hopefully they will help but it will take time. We are also contacting a lawyer. At this point we have changed our credit card numbers and notified El Cid that we will not honor the contract due to deceitful practices.
We also notified the Phoenix Vacation Property Management that we do not want to sell our Wyndham points and hopefully we won't lose those because if we do we will have lost all of our timeshare that was almost paid off and still have a 20,000 dollar debt!
We just want people to know what we have gone through to save them from this nightmare. We never thought that we would fall for a scam but it CAN happen and it CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. Don't take our word for it check other websites just Google Mexican timeshare El Cid.
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