When making a timeshare purchase that costs thousands of dollars, you should expect professional and legitimate service from all the timeshare staff members that you encounter. The salespeople are hired by the resort to represent their sales efforts. As such, the timeshare salesperson should provide you with a business card with their personal email address and telephone number that belongs to the resort system. If the sales person gives you a business card with their name hand printed on the card with their hotmail, yahoo or Gmail email address or their personal cell phone number, walk away as this is a scam! They will try to convince you that they are doing you a favor by providing you with their personal contact information where you can reach them at anytime if you have any questions or problems. They also fraudulently claim to even be available in the evenings and on weekends because they are dedicated to their clients’ well-being. This is a common scam in the timeshare industry.

In reality, we have heard from many defrauded timeshare purchasers who have experienced problems with their timeshare memberships. When they try to contact their salesperson at their personal email address, the message is returned as undeliverable. The salespeople set up these email addresses to give the impression of excellent customer service; however, these are false email addresses, so the message will not get delivered or will get sent to an inactive account to which no one checks or responds. The personal cell phone numbers are also a scam. When clients try to contact them, they are typically inactive or disconnected phone numbers. The clients are left feeling helpless and foolish for believing the salesperson’s lies about pretending to be their friend.

It is wise to ensure that you have the correct names and professional contact information for all the people that you were in contact with during the sales presentation to ensure that you don’t get scammed and in case you are required to follow up with them regarding your membership. You should even attempt to send an email or call them at the address/number they provide you before you agree to sign any contract. Take your time to do the research to ensure that their contact information is valid, so that you do not get caught in a situation of timeshare fraud. When spending tens of thousands of dollars on an investment, you need to ensure that your hard-earned money is being entrusted in good hands.

When clients try to contact the resorts to ask for their salesperson, they are often told that the salesperson no longer works there, or was fired. It is true that there is high turnover in the timeshare industry. This is due to many reasons, here are just a few:

• Legitimate salespeople are encouraged to use fraudulent tactics to increase sales, so they choose to quit as they do not like to risk their name by using unethical practices in a timeshare scam.

• The salespeople do not want to follow up on complaints of fraud or timeshare scam, so they leave to work at other resorts. Some timeshare salespeople have a history of moving from resort-to-resort very quickly in order to avoid prosecution of their timeshare fraud.

• The timeshare resorts fire the salesperson to use them as a scapegoat. The resort claims that they did not support the salesperson’s unethical practices, so the person was fired. The resort also claims that they cannot cancel timeshare memberships that were sold by this person because it was not their fault and they don’t have individual proof of the lies that the salesperson told to the individual client in the scam.

• In reality, the salesperson does still work in the office, but his or her secretary has been advised to say that they no longer work there in order to render the scammed client to feel like they have no recourse.