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 Stories of those who have been victimized in Mexico

 

Below are stories people from around the country have sent detailing their experiences.   I have had people call me explaining their stories as well, so Please TAKE WARNING!  If it sounds just to good to be true... it is.  The SAD but TRUE fact is, even on vacation you cannot let your guard down- not even in Paradise.

Richard and Jean K.

I emailed you yesterday explaining what happened to us on April 18th, 2015 while in Cabo on vacation. We went to the LHI presentation and stupidly bought into it as the two salesmen that we had made it sound awfully good. Anyway, I contacted our credit card company after we got home because of fees we were charged on our card that the two salesmen said, we would not be charged. AmEx has been disputing this and it is now going on the third month and I got a letter from AmEx yesterday to inform us that LHI will not refund our money. I cannot reach anyone at LHI. I hope you can help us. We have been scammed of $22,084.61 and we are just sick about this. I hope to hear back from you soon.

 

Sincerely, Richard & Jean

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Richard M

 

  • Subject Punta Resorts; Cabo San Lucas

  • July 17, 2015

  • Message I have the same story as you but the names are different. The company name on the contract is; Compania Hotelera Nadia, S.A. DE C.V. - Punta Resorts. My wife and I met with the Punta Resorts folks in Cabo San Lucas on June 2, 2015 in an office next to the Holiday Inn Express (across from Costco). The sales person was Sherrie Leah Carter and her husband Larry. The closer's name is Leif Kaufman. After a long sales presentation, my wife and I did finally agree to purchase a 4 week residency contract for a pre-construction 2 bedroom resort unit to be built on beach property directly behind the offices. I have never heard of a scam as well prepared and orchestrated as this one. They took us to breakfast and also to dinner that night. At the presentation after breakfast they quoted the unit at $129,500 regular but discounted to $59,900 as a pre-construction special. They promised us $38,500 for our two bedroom Marriott lock-off which is a deeded unit at Grande Vista, Orlando, Florida. I asked why they would pay that much and the answer was the fact that we are “grandfathered” into a deeded unit which is no longer available so, very valuable. They desired to use our Marriott timeshare unit as a marketing incentive for other buyers. We negotiated the reduction of the remaining $21,400 down to $19,000 due to credit limits on our credit cards. We placed a total of $19,000 on two credit cards; American Express Delta Platinum and Marriott Visa Platinum. Punta contracted with a third party company to liquidate our timeshare; Mr. Douglas Harris, Director, Platinum Marketing of America (PMA), One Shell Square, 701 Poydras Street, New Orleans, LA 70139, phone: 504-208-9919. The contract listed the buyer as; Frederick Hollands. Platinum Marketing of America required $999 as a processing fee before they would process the sale. When I called the phone number, a Ms Elizabeth Watkins answered and, after several questions, explained the process. I asked to be connected to the Accounting Dept. so I could ensure the final payment was sent directly to me…not Punta Resorts. I spoke with a Bradly Watson in the PMA Accounting Dept. He assured me that PMA must contact me directly for release of the final funds. He promised to put that statement in my file. I have communicated several times with PMA. Ms Elizabeth Watkins, has told me on two occasions that a meeting with the “buyer” is scheduled. I find out today a meeting with the “buyer” was held on Friday June 26. Ms Watkins informs me now that the “buyer” took copies of the contract for review by his attorney. I explained to Ms Watkins that the $38,500 sale price was a firm offer in my contract. PMA seems to indicate that the buyer can turn down the purchase. That was not the agreement provided by the Punta sales person, closer and manager. Ms Watkins now states that the process normally takes from 120-180 days. More stall tactics, I think. The big sales push by Punta was the opportunity to get us out from under the Marriott annual maintenance fee. They were offering the first 100 buyers a "no maintenance fee for life" incentive. Of course, we were buyer number 98. Punta also offered $2,500 annual payment to be paid directly to us for each unit should we decide to release them to the company for rental at the first of each year. That would be $2,500 x 4 weeks = $10,000 per year! We would have the opportunity to use any of that money to buy luxury vacations using their concierge service; “The Residency Collection” at theresidencycollection.com. No maintenance fees and $10,000 cash per year! Yeah….to good to be true! The Residency Club website user name and password was 3 weeks in coming. Once we logged into the concierge site, we found it to be a technical mess and poorly maintained. We found that it the website had been hastily created in April 2015. We found that the web links on the site do not work and passwords can’t be reset, just to name a few problems. I immediately called “The Residency Collection” customer service number provided on the website; (410) 800-4792. The address given is 10320 Little Patuxent Parkway, Suite 200, Columbia, Maryland, 21044. Once the female rep answered, I immediately heard music playing and children playing in the background. I mentioned this but she denied any children were present. She was unfriendly and unable to answer my web site navigation questions. This was the “first class” concierge service our sales person bragged about during our presentation. This site is poorly maintained and poorly run. I can’t yet speak to the value of the vacations offered. We received 2,000 Pesos and a free resort week for attending the presentation. We received an additional week for buying. We were given an additional contract to use at Punta's Mazatlan property until the new property was to be completed in 18 months. The only bright side to the purchase agreement is that we signed a two year “100% money back guarantee – no questions asked” or the opportunity to sell the unit at market value. Unfortunately, I don’t imagine that agreement is worth the paper it’s written on. However, this is our final wild card to reverse this disaster. One of the most amazing things to me in all of this is that Leif Kaufman, the Punta closer, stays in contact us. He vehemently insists that I contact him with any concerns or problems whatsoever, which have attempted to do on many occasions. Unfortunately, even though he responds, he is terrible at following through and never actually provides any useful information. I recently sent him a list of questions of which he stated he forwarded to “corporate” so they could fix everything. The issue I am having now is that I do not have any solid evidence that this is a scam. Everything is circumstantial. So far, the most serious allocation I can prove is that it is a poorly run company...nothing more. I have initiated a dispute request with Chase Bank and American Express. Today I am submitting a formal request to Leif Kaufman to exercise our money back guarantee. We’ll see how that turns out.

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  • Message Details:
    • Name Laurie
    • Subject scam
    • Message Have you heard anything about The Residence Collecton? I believe it may be the name of the company at this time. Different names and different pictures but the same story for us. If interested please contact me. My husband and I believe we have been scammed also.
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Message Received: July 27, 2015

We fell for it. :-{

We were in Cabo for the third time on June 16th and fell for this scam. We enjoy Cabo and the local people are very nice. This will not be the last time we go there, but we will definitely be better educated on the art of Time Share presentations. In fact I probably will never go to one again. (No matter what they offer me!) Anyway, we have wrote a letter to the credit card company explaining the situation. Now we need to make a paper trail. Do you suggest writing an email AND sending a certified letter? What exactly should I include in the email/letter. I(we) have never done anything like this before. Although we are educated I'm not sure of the proper "legal" wording to use. I could use your help if possible. Thank you for this website. We are so embarrassed that we fell for this.
J.
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    • Name Rexene & Phil H- Michigan
    • Subject Luxury Holiday International/Punta Resorts
    • Message From reading all of this information, I believe we were scammed in Playa del Carmen by Aaron Jones and his wife (british speaking lady) back in March 2015. Same scenerio. We have over a million Wyndham timeshare points and they offered us $240,000.00 for them if we purchased. We weren't biting and they finally offered us 300 weeks vacation, and a studio timeshare. We bought the bait! We charged $13,750.00 on our credit card. They said the $240,000.00 would be put into escrow with Platinum Marketing of America, who would be doing the title transfers. We turned in one week of vacation toward the purchase price also and was suppose to pay the balance of $12,450.00 from the escrow amount, the the rest of the money was ours to keep. After we got home we received an email from L. Cooper from Platinum indicating they could not work on the transfer until we wired them $999.00, which my husband did on April 9, 2015. We have received several email from this lady indicating first that they have a buyer (we were told Luxury Holiday International was buying the Wyndham points. Then we are told the buyer is having trouble with his bank and Platinum's Accounting Department is going to meet with his bank. The last email from her last week indicated the buyer was going to pay cash in 6 weeks. I did email copies of our Wyndham title to her as verification of our ownership. There was much more discussed during our "presentation" and we were taken to their office by someone who was from another resort we were staying at. If you would like to discuss this or can provide any help, please contact my husband.
  • Sent on: 29 July, 2015
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Daniel J. - August 3, 2015
Caution to all of the tourists. My husband and I went to a presentation for Residence La Jolla who then changed their name to Punta Pacifica and are currently named Punta Resort operating in Cabo San Lucas in an office next to Holiday Inn Express . We fell for their scam when they made us buy a memberships and promised to buy our timeshare which never happend. We have been fighting this matter with our credit card company with very little results so we have been doing our own investigation on them and after paying people off to try to get to the bottom of this we have found the real names of the owners and sales representatives. The 3 owners are FERNANDO LOVATO AND ELIOS PADILLA GOMEZ as well as ALBARO GONZALES SANDOVAL. Their sales reprentatives are MARICELA PADILLA who goes by MARIA and works out of Mazatlan an American sales rep is ARRON who's last name nobody seems to know they are all curently in Cabo San Lucas with the new scam of PUNTA RESORT and we want to prevent anyone else from falling victims as we did. If anyone has fallen victim to the companies mentioned I welcome you to ask for justice and our money back now that we have their names we are initiating legal steps in hopes of the apprehention of these felons.

 

 

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We were in Playa del Carmen in March 2015 and attended a sales presentation on 5th Avenue and Main, kind of behind Ah Cacao Chocolate Shop or Cafe. They were going to purchase our timeshare points for $240,000.00. We paid almost $14,000.00 down payment toward Luxury Holiday International (LHI) for 300 weeks of vacation to anywhere in the world to be used within the next 50 years. We would also own a one week stay at a studio condo in another Mexican town, which we would receive $2500.00 per year if we didn't use our week there. The $240,000.00 would be placed in escrow with Plantinum Marketing of American, who was to take care of our timeshare transfer. We had to wire them $999.00 to cover transfer and processing fees. Once the transfer was complete, the remaining $12,000.00 we still owed LHI would be paid our of the escrow account and we would receive a check for the remainder. Needless to say, things just haven't seemed to be going the way they were explained to us. Phone calls not answer or returned from either LHI or Platinum. No answer at the Customer Service number, etc. On July 29th I started searching the internet and found out this entire deal was a scam. We should have known that something that sounded to good to be true, was exactly that! We now have a lot of letters to send requesting a refund and documents to copy for our credit card company to try to get our money back! PLEASE, PLEASE, if you are approached by anyone to attend a presentation of this nature, run in the opposite direction!! This is an international SCAM. People have been scamed out of anywhere between $6,000.00 to $70,000.00. If you have already been taken by this scam please visit www.caboscamlucas.com There is  some good information on the website.

 

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  • Name:  Joel F.

    • Subject The Residency Collection

    • Message My wife and I were in Playa Del Carmen in late April 2015. While walking on Fifth Avenue we were approached about purchasing a luxury condo to be built. The price was way out of our range. When the presenter learned that we had a timeshare at Royal Resorts they offered to buy it from us for $60,000 US dollars. We were skeptical and did not immediately say we would sell it but the salesman prepared some paperwork in the event we decided to do so. He then made us an offer to join The Residency Collection promising us 100 weeks of vacation rentals at substantially discounted rates all over the world. We agreed to purchase for $7,733. which was charged to our Visa card. We were provided with documentation for the Residency Collection along with a user name and Password.

    • About a week ago I went on the Residency Collection website and booked a week in Aruba, March 19 to March 26, 2015. After not receiving an email confirmation I phoned the Residency Collection phone number 410-800-4792. The female who spoke with an Hispanic accent told me that I should not have booked through the Residency Collection website but that I should have called or emailed their customer service department. A day later I received an email confirmation of my reservation in Aruba but I was also contacted by a gentlemen from a company called Hemishpere Vacations or travel. This company is a legitimate company that provides vacation condo rentals. Apparently, unbeknownst to Hemisphere, The Residency Collection somehow gained access to their membership restricted website and booked my week in Aruba. The representative from Hemisphere informed me that no one in his company is aware of The Residency Collection and they are not authorized to sell vacation rentals via the Hemisphere website. Hemisphere honored my purchase of the week in Aruba and attempted to contact someone at the Residency Collection. No one from the Residency Collection would return his call. The salesman in Playa del Carmen identified himself as Aaron Berumen with an email address: ajberumen72@gmail.com and a phone number 011-52-1-984-138-5009. I have not yet reached out to him. I just tried to log on to the Residency Collection website but suddenly my log on and password information are incorrect. My first call tomorrow morning will be to the Residency Collection office number. More to come .

 

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  • Name Edward M.

  • Subject timeshare scam

  • Message On September 7, 2015 we attended a “presentation” for a timeshare at the Punta Pacifico resort in Mazatlan, Mexico, where Juan J. Hueso and Maria offered us breakfast, a tour of their facilities and made their timeshare pitch. They offered to buy our two (2) vacation timeshares that we already owned for several years at prices that seemed not unreasonably higher than we thought they were worth, but as both a vacation program and an investment we realized that they did have a value that had accrued over that 10 to 12 year period. As with all these “presentations,” there is always a high pressure pitch with offers, options, features, figures calculated and pressure to buy their program. We, unfortunately, succumbed to their pitch, thought that they had answered all our questions to our satisfaction, used our charge cards to pay the $25,078.90 purchase price and signed their documents. We, Cynthia and Edward McDonnell desire to cancel our purchase of Punta Pacifico timeshares/vacation program.

  • Perhaps it is the fact that neither my wife nor I are business people used to dealing with large sums of money, or that I am retired and we rely solely on Cynthia’s income and my Social Security, but we, as a family unit are not in a financial position to lose the $25,000.00 that is at the crux of this deal. We were told that we could use money from the sale of our two timeshares and apply that to the cost of buying their resort timeshare. That got glossed over in the flimflam! We asked whether there were ANY other fees at all and were told “No,” yet we found that in order to process the sale of our timeshares to Platinum Marketing of America, we needed to come up with an additional $999.00 USD each for the two transactions. That got glossed over in the flimflam! Now, upon reflection and a great deal of research, I find myself troubled by the prospect of having put my family in a precarious financial position. Now that I’m not under the “pressure of the deal,” able to analyze clearly the “flim flam,” the “pitch,” and the “presentation,” I must rescind my authorization and cancel and reject this contract with Punta Resorts as null and void, and request the return of all monies surrendered toward this contract. I also question whether someone who will be tasked with handling many thousands of dollars in sales would start our official first communication with this sentence… “It is just a pleasure to have you as member for this legitimism company, my name is Joshua Carter Ill be your account executive for this following process that you are going to take with us.” Doesn’t give me much confidence that I’m dealing with a competent person in a “legitimate” company! Social media and the internet is a powerful source of information today. I have researched Punta Pacifico, Punta Resorts Cabo, Cancun, Mazatlan, Platinum Marketing of America, Holiday Systems International, Compania Hotelier Nadia, S.A. de C.V, Condo Share Interval, Residence La Jolla, Amazing Memories Club, Maricela Padilla, Maria and Juan J. Hueso and I am overwhelmed at the number of complaints, investigations and accusations of fraud and scams that are listed regarding these people and companies. I have listed as many names, phone numbers, email addresses and URL’s as I have found to substantiate the reason for cancellation of our contract. Companies:

 

 

 

  • Holiday Systems International (HSI) - Enrollment Application (attachment K), Compania Hotelier Nadia, SA DE CV., Ave. Delfina #110 Cerritos. C.P. 82100, Nuevo Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico. Phone: (52) 669-989-2929, Fax: (52) 669-988-1384, US/ Canada: 800-353-0774, Mexico: 01-800-681-1809 or Direct: 702-254-3100, email: service@holidaysystems.com, Mail: 7690 W. Cheyenne Ave., Ste. 200, Las Vegas, NV 89129, or URL: www.holidaysystems.com •

 

  • Platinum Marketing of America (attachment L), Douglas Harris, Director, One Shell Square, 701 Poydras Street, New Orleans, LA 70139, Phone: (504) 208-9919, email: clientservices@pmofamerica.com, URL: www.pmofamerica.com • Fees page  • Fees page for transfer of title/ownership of Unlimited Vacation Club resort vacation property for $999.00 USD at the sale price of $36,200.00 USD within 180-270 days. Fees page for transfer of title/ownership of Worldmark by Wyndham resort vacation property for $999.00 USD at the sale price of $53,00.00 USD within 180-270 days.

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    • Name Ron

    • Subject Punta Resorts scam

    •  While on vacation in Cabo San Lucas on June 2,2015 my wife and I attended a presentation in a room next to the Holiday Inn Express. We were promised $500 cash for attending...which we should have taken and RAN! A salesman, Larry who worked with his wife Sherry Carter, took us downstairs for breakfast and then showed us a fake video presentation of the proposed property which we could buy into for a reduced "pre-construction" rate. He offered to buy us out of our current timeshare for market value. We would apply this to the price of their offer and when the deal was finalized we would receive $12,000 back for our property. We sent them the $999 fee for processing, we paid them several thousand dollars by credit card while we were there and sent them the additional contract price of $11,000 by wire when we got home. Thomas Gordon aka Thomas Nolan, the man with the heavy Scottish accent, was the closer on our deal. I have spoken to him and communicated by email several times with continued empty promises. He also supposedly was to make us a reservation for a trip in November which I wired the funds for but they never followed through. We are retired folks on a very limited income and this money represented a possibility of a vacation time with our kids and grandkids that we could not do otherwise. I know this means nothing to these types of persons. We will follow-up with as much communication to all of the agencies suggested as we can.

  • Sent on: 19 November, 2015

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WARNING FROM THE MEXICAN PEOPLE LIVING IN CABO SAN LUCAS:

  • Name: Alexia

  • Subject : Pedregal scam

  • Message:  I saw the Pedregal scam up for a few days and now taken down. A co-worker emailed me saying there are now two homes being used to scam tourists. Maranata being the first one and now Cima del Paraiso. Now they have hired 12 new reps from Mazatlan. The most corrupt ones. Someone has to stop these people.

 

 

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