After getting off the plane in Cancun Mexico, I was greeted by a "travel advisor" who acted helpful in providing information about travel in Cancun, the hotels, and things to do. Quickly moved into a timeshare style presentation where I was told that if my wife and I listened to a 45 minute presentation, we would be first fed breakfast, our travel to the hotel would be reimbursed and they'd pay for an excursion of our choice.
Breakfast was good, then they went into the full timeshare spiel. They first tried to sell us 4 units for two weeks with the idea that we'd rent back two of them and it would pay for part of the investment. $150,000. Too much. Then they provided several other options ranging down to about $35,000. All were totally out of our financial reach.
After 2 hours and several final "no!"s, the last person told us that he could sell us a straight 15 week over 10 year package for $17,000. Still too much. He then said that he'd subtract the value of our current time share $15,000 and not even have us sign it over as they consider them worthless trinkets anyway. Now he was down to about $2,000. He discounted that another 20% and was down to $1599. That seemed like a good deal for something he was originally asking $17,000.
It seemed too good to be true and it was. It was an outright lie and a complete scam.
It was supposed to be for 15 weeks where we could select any size unit at the mayan palace resorts (they shows us 6 lovely resort layout clay models) — no confusion what he was selling — and all we had to do was pay for maintenance fees, typically about $450/unit/week.
The $450/unit/week was the second part of the scam. When we signed the contracts, we were told at least a dozen times that the $450 in the contract referred to our payment of the maintenance fee.in reality, they sold us a membership in a wholesale vacation club (HSI) where we had the "right" to buy 15 weeks at $450 each. Later investigation revealed that such a $450 week was nothing like the mayan palace. It would be the equivalent of a $70/night motel.
When I returned to the hotel room, I started to get suspicious.
I left several messages on the salesperson's ("Carlos") cellphone. My wife is bilingual, she recognized his outgoing message and his voice so we know we had the right number. Calls were never returned. Send an email to the email they provided me. It was never returned.
I contacted the credit card company to report fraud and to see about getting my money back. They told me that I had an absolute right to revoke a timeshare agreement if I did so within ten days.
Upon returning to the states, I tried again to contact them. HSI said they couldn't cancel the contract, that only the Mayan Group could. They gave me a mexican number which I called. I reached the Mayan Group and they told me that only Carlos could help me and of course he wasn't there. When I asked for somebody else to assist, they hung up on me!
0 comments