The Scammers are being Scammed

Hehe. Looks like some people called National Vacation Sales and Service are trying to scam Worldmark owners.

A recent Redseason.com.au newsletter says:

There is a resale company in the USA that has somehow managed to get a hold of the full member listing for all Worldmark owners (including owner names, phone numbers and the number of credits owned by each member). I would love to know how they obtained this information as Wyndham really should not be releasing personal information to these guys.

The company is called National Vacation Sales and Service and operates out of Florida USA and is offering ridiculously high prices to rent or buy memberships.

One member who contacted me was offered over A$9000 just to rent her available points on a 7000 credit membership. This is definitely a scam as they could buy the full membership from us for under A$7000 so please do not fall for overseas companies offering high prices for your membership - no doubt if you accepted you would be asked for some sort of listing fee or to provide your bank details to them.

A bit of Google searching also revealed a warning on the Worldmark website. Interestingly, this is a warning to Worldmark South Pacific owners.

This started to look interesting, and a bit more searching found this transcript on Timeshare Users Group Online Community Forums:

Q:How did you get my Mom's name?

A: Our financing company, Tamaac sent out a postcard to people with timeshares asking if they wanted to sell it, when they didnt respond, they passed the name to my company, so we called your Mom.

Q: What's the $1500 for? It seems potentially risky, throwing nearly 10% of the value of the property for a potential sale.
A: That's $1500 she would have to spend anyway if she were going to sell it to get the same documents.

(Unsolicited, from him): We wouldn't even be contacting you if we didn't need your property.

Q: So you're saying you have a buyer on the line, right now?
A: it's against the law for us to tell you that.

Q: Well, it seems that if you had a buyer on the line, why wouldn't your company just cover those costs, against the price of the timeshare? That way, when she sold it, she would receive $18,000, minus the $1500 of the cost of processing those documents.

A: Well that would be against the law. We're not allowed to work on commission.

The transcript has more and makes a fun read!

So, it looks like the standard Nigerian 419 scam that tries to get your money up-front with the promise of a later financial return. Yeah, sure!

-- Fabbo
Tags: trendwest worldmark