Police have arrested 56 Britons in an investigation concerning timeshare fraud in Spain. In total, there were 60 arrests across 11 companies in a €30million scam which has involved over 500 victims, many of them pensioners from the UK.
The suspects are alleged to have phoned victims and “offered to buy their timeshares at a very attractive price and asked for an advance handling fee,” police told a news conference in Malaga earlier this week. The victims each handed over between €300 and €50,000, but the sale never went through.
Even after some of the victims realised they’d been tricked, some of the fraudsters posed as lawyers offering to help them get their savings back.
Around €1million of property and assets were seized by officers, among them a boat, six cars, 49 computers, a money-counting machine and a paper shredder: 78 bank accounts have been frozen.
