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Re: Vallarta Gardens Timeshare Scam (by Pamela H.):
Before I delve into how pathetic, dishonest, untrustworthy and sinister these people are, DO NOT GO TO A PRESENTATION AT VALLARTA GARDENS unless you are an investigative reporter or a government official trying to expose this deceitful game of scamming innocent people and depleting their hard-earned money. Yes, it’s a beautiful resort, but we only found that out by being lured there at a kiosk outside Walmart in Nuevo Vallarta. Shame on us for doing that in the first place. Paco, our sales person, was very soft-spoken and presented himself professionally. He was never pushy, which impressed us. The allure for us was the fact they would sell our 2 timeshares in Costa Rica for more than we originally had paid for them. Hm, are you catching my drift? In 300 days a 3rd party company called PILA would pay us this hefty amount of money. Oh, and there’s a bonus! You pay us $5,700 now, and another 3rd party company called Cromwell & Berkley will guarantee that in 6 years you will be paid $75,000, or in 10 years (the cap of 10 years) you will be paid $200,000. When something seems too good to be true, it almost always is; however, Paco seemed so honest, so we bought into it. Now we have paid these scumbags $45,000 for a one-bedroom unit, a promise of our timeshare sales of $42,000 in 300 days and a promise of a large payout in the future. I might add that we are seniors, and a guarantee of the promised funds was really something to look forward to. The contract read that we needed to pay a maintenance fee for at least one week, but we would be paid (as part of a marketing program) $2,500 for the 4 weeks we didn’t use our timeshare. That was $10,000 a year. What a deal, except it was never going to happen. Well, 300 days went by. Oops, PILA was no longer the 3rd party, not a company anymore. A man named “Steven” called us and said he was an attorney who was now handling the sale of our timeshares, but there was a problem with the way the contracts with our timeshares were first set up. It’s too much work to explain all the double talk he threw at us, but it culminated in us sending him $5,700 so we could pay for taxes on the properties. He gave us an account number for the wiring of funds to a person, not a company. It gets worse. Then about 2 weeks later he said we owed him another $16,500, but we would get all the money we paid him back when the transfer went through. When we said to forget it, he threatened us that legal action would be his recourse, and we then owe some exorbitant amount of money. He continued to call many times leaving hateful and threatening messages. We finally blocked his number. We made a call to Vallarta Gardens to ask for the new company now handling the sale, and the lady at the desk hesitantly told me it was Arrow Marketing. She said she didn’t have the number, so we found it online. A very nice guy, seemingly honest, named Gustavo began handling the process of getting our money. Phone calls and emails went on for a year or more, and the reason was the same as what Steven had told us. The Arrow attorneys were working on it. Right! Then COVID hit, which gave Arrow, which by the way is a fake company, a chance to prolong this nightmare. In the meantime, we received so many phone calls from people saying they were now handling the sale of the timeshares. We dismissed them. The story that was most believable was when 2 guys named Jose and Alejandro said they worked for the Mexican attorney general’s office and were in the process of putting these scammers in prison. They wanted all our documentation on all our emails, timeshare contracts, basically just about every correspondence we’d ever had since we began this mess. We had already sent so many pages of documents to Arrow and Steven. A pattern was finally emerging. All our documents were being sold to others so they could have a different twist on a new scam. We hired a lawyer in Mexico who stated that Vallarta Gardens uses a third party to avoid being responsible for the money you never receive, but they are essentially the same company. Arrow Marketing is now Alliance, and Cromwell & Berkley is another name. The names are irrelevant because they are fake. By the way, we went to the site of the attorney general’s office, and these scammers used actual names of Jose and Alejandro who did work for that office. I consequently sent an email to the government letting them know that scammers were using official names of the government and gave them phone numbers and email addresses they were using. We never heard back from them. This has been a huge financial burden for us, and the fact we still have to pay a maintenance fee forever is a heartbreak as we will never go there. We have posted negative comments on as many sites as we have investigated so that people will stay away from this unbelievable corrupt place.