The FBI is warning timeshare owners to be aware of a widespread telemarketing scam involving a violent Mexican drug cartel that is trying to trick people into believing someone wants to buy their property. This is the story of a couple who recently lost more than $50,000 to a timeshare scam involving at least a dozen fraudulent escrow, title and real estate firms.
One of the fake real estate companies that try to swindle elderly people out of money with false promises to buy their timeshares.
One night in late 2022, someone called Mr. & Mrs. Dimitruka retired couple from Ontario, Canada and asked if they had ever considered selling their timeshare in Florida. The person on the phone gave his current address and said he had an interested buyer in Mexico. Would they be interested in selling it?
The Dimitruks had bought a timeshare years ago, but it wasn’t fully paid for — they still owed about $5,000 before they could officially sell it. That wouldn’t be a problem for this buyer, the man on the phone assured them.
Within days, their contact at an escrow company in New York called ecurrencyescrow[.]llc he faxed them forms to fill out and send back to begin the process of selling their timeshare to a potential buyer, who had offered a higher price than the property was likely to be worth.
After some forms were signed and faxed, the Dimitruks were asked to send a small wire fee of more than $3,000 to cover “administrative” and “processing” fees, supposedly so the sale wouldn’t get caught up in any legal red tape. in Mexico.
This exchange of documents continued for almost a year, during which time the realtors made additional financial demands, such as sales tax payments, and various administrative fees. Mrs. Dimitruk even sent them a $5,000 wire to pay off his remaining balance on the time frame they thought they were selling.
In a telephone interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Mr. Dimitruk said they lost more than $50,000.
“They kept calling me after that saying, ‘Hey, your money is waiting for you here’,” he said William Dimitruka 73-year-old retired truck driver. “They said ‘We will be in trouble if the money is not returned to you,’ and they gave me a toll-free number to call.”
In the last phone call he made with these crooks, the man on the other end of the line admitted that there were bad people who had worked for them in the past, but those workers had been fired.
“At the end of the call he said, ‘You’ve been dealing with bad people and we fired those bad people,'” Dimitruk recalled. “So they were like, yes everything is good. You can go ahead and pay us and we will send you your money.”
According to the FBI, there are very bad people behind these scams. The FBI warns that timeshare fraud schemes are linked to Jalisco New Generation drug company in Mexico.
In July 2024, the FBI and the Treasury Department Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has warned the Jalisco cartel is using call centers like a fence room targeting people who own the times:
“It is based in Mexico [transnational criminal organizations] like the Jalisco New Generation Cartel is increasingly targeting US timeshare owners in Mexico through sophisticated and often multi-year telemarketing schemes, impersonations, and early payment schemes. They use illegal proceeds to diversify their income and finance other criminal activities, including the production and trafficking of illegal fentanyl and other synthetic drugs into the United States.”
A July 2024 CBS News story about the scams notes that U.S. and Mexican officials last year confirmed that as many as eight young workers were confirmed dead after they tried to quit work at the company’s Jalisco call center.
Source: US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The fake escrow company Dimitruks works with – ecurrencyescrow[.]llc — is no longer online. But documents posted by contacts there mentioned several other sites that are still active, including realestateassetsllc[.]com
The original registration records for both domains refer to another domain – datasur[.]the host – that is associated with a number of other real estate and estates with titles going back at least four years. Some of these domains are no longer active, while others were previously hosted on different hosting providers.
oh 061[.]the net
061-newyorkrealty[.]the net
1nydevelopersgroupllc[.]com
1oceanrealtyllc[.]com
advancedclosingservicesllc[.]com
americancorporatetitle[.]com
accessorieslegalsiglo[.]com
atencion-tributaria.[]com
carolinasctin[.]the net
closingandsettlementservices[.]com
closingandsettlementsllc[.]com
closingsettlementllc[.]com
crefaescrowslimited[.]the net
ecurrencyescrow[.]llc
empirellc[.]com
fiduciarocitibanamex[.]com
fondosmx[.]org
freightescrowcollc[.]com
goldmansachs-investment[.]com
hgvcorp[.]com
infodivisionfinanciera[.]com
internationaladvisorllc[.]com
jadehillrealtyllc[.]com
lewindassociaterealty[.]com
with a good reputation[.]org
privateinvestment.com[.]co
realestateassetsllc[.]com
realestateisinc[.]com
maintenance and management[.]com
stllcservices[.]com
stllcservices[.]the net
thebluehorizonrealtyinc[.]com
walshrealtyny[.]the net
windsorre[.]com
By uploading ecurrencyescrowllc[.]com on the Wayback Machine at archive.org, we can see text at the top of the page that reads, “Visit our resource library for videos and tools designed to make managing your escrow payments easier.”
A search of that microtext on publicwww.com shows the same text from an escrow company’s website called Eschieldsecurity Network (escshieldsecurity[.]com). The business claims to have been around since 2009, but the site itself is less than two years old, and there is no contact information associated with the site. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State also has no record of a business with this name at its listed address.
Unsurprisingly, Escshieldsecurity positions itself as a solution to timeshare foreclosure scams.
“By 2015, cyber thieves had realized the value of money involved and were targeting the real estate, title and real estate industries,” the company’s website said. “As financing becomes more complex and risky, agents and underwriters have less time or resources to work. The industry needs a simple solution that allows it to comply with the new security requirements of the subsidy. “
The domains associated with this scam will usually refer to legitimate companies and licensed professionals in real estate and closing businesses, but those real professionals often have no idea they’re being faked until someone starts asking around. The truth is, the first tip from a reader that caused KrebsOnSecurity to investigate this program came from one such expert whose name and reputation were being used to scam others.
It’s unclear whether the Dimitruks were hijacked by people working for the Jalisco cart, but it’s clear that whoever is responsible for managing many of the domains listed above – including the DNS provider’s database[.]host — has just compromised his computer with information-stealing malware.
That’s according to data collected by breach-tracking service Constella Intelligence [Constella is currently an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity]. Constella discovered that someone using the email address was exposed in datasur’s DNS records[.]The host — [email protected] — is also exempt from the above-mentioned multi-domain management features of the Mexican hosting provider.
It is not uncommon for victims of such scams to keep mum about their misfortune. Sometimes, it is shame and embarrassment that prevents victims from filing a report with local authorities. But in this case, victims who find themselves robbed by a violent drug cartel have even more reason to remain silent.
William Dimitruk admitted that he and his wife have not yet filed a police report. But after acknowledging that it could help prevent harm to other would-be victims, Mr. Dimitruk said he would consider it.
There’s another reason victims of scams like this should notify the authorities: Occasionally, the feds will bust one of these scams and confiscate the stolen funds from the victims. But that investigation could take years, and it could be years before the government starts trying to figure out who was defrauded and how to pay the victims. Often, the real obstacle to recovering some of those losses is that suppliers don’t know who the victims are.
If you are the victim of a timeshare scam like this one, please consider filing a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), at ic3.gov. Other areas where victims may wish to file a complaint:
Federal Trade Commission – https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov
International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network – https://www.econsumer.gov/en
Profeco – Attorney General of Mexico –
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