How BBC secret filming exposed a £28m timeshare fraud | UK News

It has been described by prosecutors as one of the largest frauds of its kind in the UK.

A total of 14 people have been convicted for their part in a £28m conspiracy to defraud more than 3,500 timeshare owners.

The victims were desperate to get out of decades-old timeshare contracts and went looking for help.

Most were aged between 60 and 80. More than 500 of them lost over £10,000, and one handed over more than £80,000.

Those targeted were subjected to high-pressure sales meetings lasting up to six hours. They were left out of pocket, owning useless fake “credits” and still locked into expensive timeshare contracts they often could no longer use.

The company at the centre of the fraud was Sell My Timeshare (SMT). They took people’s money to fund the owners’ lavish lifestyle of private schools, millionaire mansions and private jets.

The man at the top of the company, Mark Rowe, was given a seven-and-half year sentence in January for conspiracy to defraud.

On Friday, his wife Nicola was one of the final three to hear their sentences.

She received a two-year suspended jail sentence at Southwark Crown Court after pleading guilty to money laundering.

This has been a long time coming and represents a huge win for the people who spoke out, the police and prosecutors.

Nine years ago, I made a programme for the Scotland Investigates strand which exposed through secret filming the way SMT fleeced its victims.

Almost a decade on, the end of the criminal process brings some closure to those who were ripped off. But it’s worth knowing how the fraudsters were able to get away with it for so long.

I first heard about SMT in the summer of 2016. I was working in the investigations unit of Scotland News, making current affairs and investigative documentaries.

A friend mentioned that his mum had inherited the use of a timeshare apartment in Spain and, after years of holidays there, had begun looking to get out of the contract.

It’s worth mentioning here how popular timeshares had become with British holidaymakers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Timeshares allowed people to access the same accommodation every year, or swap their weeks with other owners who had properties in other resorts. About 600,000 sun-lovers took up that opportunity.

The first timeshare rush was accompanied by a lot of stories about rip-off merchants mis-selling properties. They became a staple of consumer and investigative TV programmes such as Watchdog and The Cook Report.

The typical timeshare contract tied investors in for decades.

By 2016, those owners who had enjoyed their guaranteed place in the sun for 20 or 30 years were ageing, and many were looking to wave goodbye to their timeshares.

Some had declining mobility and couldn’t get to their properties. Some just felt they’d got all they wanted from them. And some had died, in many cases leaving their loved ones to inherit the contracts – including their annual payments and maintenance fees.

And that’s where my friend’s mum had found herself. She searched the web for answers and found SMT, a company whose website promised to get her out of her contract.

But, having paid a fee and booked a meeting with them, her family smelled a rat.

Further research revealed hundreds of people saying they had paid money and got nothing out of it. In fact, they had lost money. A lot of it.

Our team began investigating what was going on. It quickly became clear that there were some shady characters operating in the timeshare resale sector.

One lawyer had hundreds of individual complaints waiting to sue SMT.

We spoke to people who had used the firm and they all told the same story. They thought the company would buy their property off them but when they went to a consultation (for which they paid up front) they were told there was no re-sale value.

Instead, they were encouraged – in fact pressured – to spend more money investing in “Monster Rewards”, named after the outfit’s parent company, Monster Travel.

What exactly these were was not exactly clear. They sounded like a kind of currency, giving access to discount travel and services and shopping deals

And they were apparently “tradable” with other owners, some time down the line.

Investing money up front now would result in an eventual payoff that would cover SMT’s fees and leave the property owner in profit, freed at last from their pesky contract.

Too good to be true? Well, yes.

If these accounts were true, this was a massive scam.

It’s what is called a “bait-and-switch”.

Someone – in this case SMT – “baits” the customer by advertising a particular product or service only to then say that’s not available, pushing the client towards another, inferior, product or service.

That’s illegal. Armed with all the testimony we had collected, we made the case to secretly film one of the company’s meetings.

This takes time, effort, and clear arguments for why this is the only way to gather the information needed to prove wrongdoing.

Armed with that permission, our small team set up a meeting with one of the company’s representatives in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Posing as a member of the public hoping to get his mum out of her timeshare contract, our presenter, the personal finance journalist Fergus Muirhead, filmed the entire three-hour encounter.

And everything went exactly as we’d been told.

For a start, Fergus was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, designed to stop him revealing anything that was discussed in the meeting.

Any idea the company would be able to sell the (fictional) property was soon dismissed. The only way out of it would be through Monster Rewards – and to get them, he would have to cough up £6,740 on the spot.

In the great traditions of British journalism, we made our excuses and left.

We broadcast the programme on 24 October 2016.

In the run up to transmission we gave SMT a right of reply to our allegations about their illegal business practices.

They denied any wrongdoing and questioned both the transparency and probity of our sources. They said our allegations were defamatory and they reserved the right to pursue legal action against the .

What they didn’t know, until the moment we published the online news piece ahead of transmission, was that we had everything on tape.

We never heard from them again.

Within days of broadcast, we were contacted by police who were already investigating SMT. They were looking to get hold of our footage of the recorded meeting.

As journalists, we have to be careful about handing over to the police material which we have collected for our reporting. We must remain independent, and the will not normally hand over unused material in such circumstances without a court order.

So we waited until they were granted a court order for the material, which we then complied with. And that was the last we heard of the matter for the next three-and-half years.

As the nation headed towards the first Covid lockdown in February 2020, we were informed that 19 people connected to the firm had been arrested.

Fergus and I were asked to give witness statements. We spent the next five-and-a-half years never knowing whether we would be called, or knowing what was going on.

It was only with the end of the judicial process this week that we learned there had been four trials over two years at Southwark Crown Court in London. Reporting restrictions were in place until the final guilty pleas were lodged.

In total, there were 14 convictions.

Among those was 60-year-old Josephine Cuthill-Fox, the woman we filmed in 2016. She received 24 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will now turn to pursuing the money and assets gained by the defendants through their crimes.

This story isn’t over yet.