Complaint Review: Consumer Fraud Reporting

If you get a call from someone who says he or she has funds for you that have been recovered from fraudulent timeshare resellers/brokers, and they will refund that money to your credit card for a fee - BEWARE!

This person will say they will make a payment to your credit card, and after you see the payment posted, you can pay their company's fee. They may ask you for some personal information in order to get the payment processed, such as your date of birth, and/or the last 4 digits of your SSN. They'll "try to process" the payment without it, but will call you back and say they need it. I don't know of there is any future identity theft in the works for this scam. There IS a goal to scam you out of even more money than when you were scammed in the first place by the timshare broker/reseller/listing company.

When you see the payment appear on your credit card account, or maybe even in your bank account, they'll call you back to talk to you about how you can now pay their fee. The fee is 35%, or "maybe you can get a discount" if there you or your spouse is a veteran (for example). They'll give you instructions on using Xpress Bill Pay, including all the codes you'll need and how much to pay on each of possibly more than one of their accounts (for the main office, and for the representative who just helped you with recouping the previously defrauded money).

The person will be really nice, and build trust (maybe by telling you they have a relative who lives in your town, or a town that's near you). When they want their payment though, they get a little more insistent. There may also be inconsistencies in other parts of their story. I don't want to give too many examples, because they read these boards too, and I don't want to help them learn things they shouldn't do, because they'll tip off their mark that it's all a scam.

The thing is, you go and make the payment to give them their fee (because you're so grateful to get thousands of dollars back that you thought were gone forever). THEN, your bank or credit card company tries to actually collect on that multi-thousand dollar payment they made for you, and it's not a good account, or there are insufficient funds to cover the payment. You've now lost the hundreds of dollars you paid them for their fee, and also re-feel the loss of the original thousands you lost in years past, all over again.

Thank goodness we had them make the payment to a credit card company that was very helpful in determining the whole thing was a scam BEFORE we made the fee payment and lost even more money.