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| Spain smashes British-run timeshare racket http://www.bbfans.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=26151 |
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| Author: | JimD [ 26 May 06, 19:27 ] |
| Post subject: | Spain smashes British-run timeshare racket |
Fri May 26, 2006 5:49 PM BST MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish police have smashed a British-run timeshare racket on Spain's Costa del Sol that swindled up to 15,000 people and earned criminals around 18 million euros (12.3 million pounds), police said on Friday. Police in the beachside city of Malaga arrested many of its leaders -- four Britons, two South Africans, one Belgian and a Norwegian -- during "Operation Trafalgar". One of the South African men is alleged to have masterminded the scam. "These sums represent more than 90 percent of fraud involving the resale of timeshares on the Costa del Sol that we have seen in recent years," a police statement said. Fraudsters used 300 companies and employed more than 1,000 people to run a number of different scams that preyed upon timeshare owners and others interested in buying, most of them from Britain. Offering timeshare owners the chance to sell their time slots to potential buyers, the group tricked owners into transferring money to pay for legal and management costs. In another scam, fraudsters sold the same holiday home to different people and doubled their money by taking both the seller's and buyer's funds. They even swindled some victims a second time by posing as lawyers offering legal services to recoup money stolen in the original fraud. Police said the fraudsters set up telemarketing operations in modest, unmarked offices for a few months at a time before disappearing and reappearing at a new location. The Costa del Sol has long been dubbed the 'Costa del Crime' by the tabloid press because of its reputation as the favoured retirement spot for big-time British criminals. During searches police said they found contracts, lists of thousands of properties, bank account references and a gun. Around 750,000 Britons live in Spain, the British embassy estimates, the majority of them on the coast. |
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