Transfer America Site

For those owners who are trying to get out of their timeshares, one of their main reasons of doing so is due to the costs involved in it. However, some scammers use this as a scare tactic to prey on the unsuspecting victims. Recently, the members of a timeshare resort on Cape Cod are accusing a local developer of muscling in on their treasured vacation spot and bringing in slick out-of-state marketers to con them out of their property deeds.

The developer is Cliff Hagberg who took over the Sandcastle Resort in Provincetown two years ago when everyone agrees the timeshare had gone to seed. According to Hagberg, he’s done right by the roughly 4,000 timeshare owners at the resort and he’s overseen more than $1 million in repairs to the resort, which included new decks, landscaping and a poolside snack bar. He furher stated that they’ve literally gone room by room throughout the entire resort and have a detailed list of what each room needs. Moreover, he said that the idea is not to turn the Sandcastle into a Marriott, the idea is to make it the best Sandcastle that it can be. As far as I can tell, there’s only good news at the Sandcastle.

Meanwhile, timeshare owners accuse Hagberg and his out-of-state partners of seizing control of the resort and then pressuring people to swap their deeds for membership in another timeshare. As one owners said, if they refused that deal, they were told they would be stuck paying the high cost of renovating the Sandcastle.

There are 49 timeshare owners at the Sandcastle who have filed complaints with the Attorney General’s office. They claim Hagberg and representatives of a Texas company called Outfield Marketing of using scare tactics on the owners, convincing many of them that the only way to avoid a financial nightmare with such vacation property was to give up their deeds and pay more than three thousand dollars to join a national timeshare company called Festiva Resorts.

The National Timeshare Owners Association (NTOA) will be hosting its next educational conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conference will feature national speakers and will be a great venue for timeshare owners to ask questions and receive valuable insights about the industry. The conference will be held at Milwaukee’s Clarion Hotel on…

[i-Newswire] — Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our company. In the last two years consumers have been scammed out of over 17 billion dollars in the timeshare industry alone.It is time to fight back. Put us to work for you and we will apply rigorous…

There is a growing scam nowadays telling blatant lies on the phone to those owners who are desperate to get out of their timeshare contracts. Recently, some national heat is coming down about such fraud on three Palm Beach County pitchers. The federal grand jurors in East St. Louis, Illinois, indicted Darnell Disroe, 38, and Michael Lentine, 32, of Boynton Beach and Michael Starace, 42, of Lantana. Meanwhile, Boynton Beach police and US postal inspectors cooperated in an investigation that found more than 600 victims were bilked for more than $1.3 million in 46 states and Canada.

According to an unsealed indictment, Real Timeshare Marketing asked timeshare condo owners to pay thousands of dollars for costs associated with phony pending sales. Despite collecting $1.3 million in fees between Dec. 1 and April 28, the company was not instrumental in selling a single timeshare interest, as the federal officials said.

Similar cases also have become the top complaint to a state fraud hot line, surpassing mortgage scams, and involving more than 10,000 complaints against scores of companies. Palm Beach County has been a hotbed for the business with 10 of 17 companies subpoenaed by the Florida Attorney General’s Office in March based in the county. Fines, settlements and pending civil charges at the state and local level have also addressed some of the complaints.

Currently, the federal authorities are pursuing charges of mail fraud and other offenses that carry up to 25 years in prison or fines up to $250,000 per count. Among others, an Illinois customer paid $1,886 after an agent for Real Timeshare Marketing promised someone wanted to buy the customer’s timeshare interest for more than $20,000. But the sale of such vacation property never happened, as authorities said. The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois has recently announced the charges.