You can view my online video on this subject at: http://www.youtube.com/watch? V=QHUJd4pB2qs
During the summer of my family and I decided to visit a local festival at the Burlington, VT waterfront. As we entered the festival, we noticed a table with a sign that said, Win a $1,000 Online Shopping Spree! My wife and I each submitted our personal contact information on a form, and dropped them into the provided box. Thinking that this was a contest being sponsored by the festival, and that one lucky winner was going to win a $1,000 online shopping spree, neither I nor my wife were aware that we were being misled.
About a week later, I found out that I was the lucky winner of the drawing and was congratulated by a phone caller, who told me I had won a $1,000 online shopping spree. I would just have to come down to Cedarbrook Resort and claim my prize in person.
We were pressured for 6-8 hours that day by Mr. Mark Muenchow (Sales Rep) and Mr. Lee Bacall (Manager), who used fraudulent and deceptive trade practices to pressure us into signing a timeshare contract with Cedarbrook Club.
Due to the nature in which my wife and I were led to believe that we were invited to Cedarbrook Club to claim our prize of a $1,000 online shopping spree! We feel misled, deceived, and defrauded.
We were not told before arriving at the Cedarbrook Club that the real intention for the invitation to the Cedarbrook Club was to pressure us into purchasing a timeshare.instead, we were led to believe we had actually won something of value, which turned out not to be the case at all. (While later attempting to redeem our online shopping spree at home on the internet, we were presented with a website with a limited assortment of obviously low quality products at highly inflated prices.) Additionally, the fact that we would have to pay Maintenance Fees was never mentioned or discussed during the sales pitch.
While at Cedarbrook Club, we were pressured between six to eight hours by the timeshare sales personnel, who tried multiple times to convince us to sign timeshare contract documentation. Our young children were impatient, tired, and hungry. Cedarbrook personnel also used this as a leverage tool to apply sales pressure.
After arriving home, I wrote an email to the organizers of the festival, and the contact person verified for me that the Win a $1,000 Online Shopping Spree stand was not a part of the festival. The organizers of the festival even apologized to us for the situation we found ourselves in by having been misled in such a way.
Upon trying to contact someone from the Cedarbrook Club to cancel the contract within the five day time limit, I noticed that I had not been supplied with the required contact information to do so.instead, I had been given a sheet titled, WHAT HAVE I DONE? And why? Which reads, Dont try to justify to friends or relatives. I had also not been given a copy of the contract. We were told it would be sent to us by mail, and we would receive it in approximately a week.
The fact that the contract is a generation contract which would be passed on to our children was also never mentioned. Had we been informed of this, we would have never signed such a contract.
Cedarbrook Clubs deceptive business practices will certainly cause them embarrassment, considerable time and financial burden.
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