Report Abuse

I am very sorry for maryn's unfortunate experience. I have absolutely NO affiliation with RedWeek (other than my own paid membership here), but in all fairness no web site (including RedWeek) can realistically be blamed or responsible for what happens with the personal email accounts of people simply using a third party web site to advertise. People advertising on (or responding to ads on) RedWeek are merely RedWeek customers, over whom RedWeek has absolutely no influence or control, just as on any similar site. However, in my own personal experience after some years here, RedWeek has far fewer problems with scammers than most any other timeshare related site that I am aware of. After all, anyone posting (or responding to) an ad on RedWeek must first be a paid member and very few scammers choose to create and leave behind a "paper trail" by which they can potentially be traced, identified and located (...and maybe even prosecuted) later. One scam that seems to be reported with increasing frequency in the last year or so in the timeshare world is the creation and use of phony reservation documents, made possible after a "hack" into a timeshare owners email and / or other accounts for the information and details necessary to create the bogus document. However, these situations can generally be detected and / or averted early on by the would-be tenant simply verifying the legitimacy of any such document directly with the resort involved. Using an escrow service such as that offered via RedWeek may be beneficial to a tenant, but all timeshare owners have to pay their maintenance fees long in advance of the usage week and many owners understandably do NOT want to have to wait until weeks AFTER a rental has been completed before receiving their rental payment. As a timeshare owner, I don't often rent out weeks, but I certainly understand (and share) that viewpoint.