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It has been described as one of the largest scams of its nature in the UK.

A total of 14 individuals have been sentenced for their role in a multi-million pound scheme to defraud in excess of 3,500 timeshare holders.

The targets were eager to exit long-standing holiday ownership agreements and went looking for assistance.

A large number were from 60 and 80. In excess of 500 of them parted with in excess of £10,000, and one individual transferred more than £80,000.

Those victimized were exposed to intense sales meetings continuing for six hours. They were financially worse off, holding useless fake "points" and still locked into expensive timeshare contracts they often use.

The Company At the Heart of the Scam

The company at the core of the scheme was Sell My Timeshare (SMT). They took customers' funds to support the owners' lavish lifestyle of exclusive education, high-end properties and personal aircraft.

The man at the head of the company, the company director, was handed a 90-month jail time in January for conspiracy to defraud.

Recently, his wife one of the co-defendants was part of the concluding cases to hear their sentences.

She was given a 24-month suspended prison term at Southwark Crown Court after pleading guilty to money laundering.

This has been a extended wait and signifies a significant success for the individuals who testified, the authorities and the Crown.

How the Probe Started

The first knowledge of the company was in the mid-2016. I was working in the research department of a media outlet, creating current affairs shows.

A acquaintance mentioned that his mother had inherited the ownership of a holiday property in Spain and, after decades of vacations, had commenced searching to get out of the contract.

It is important to recall how widespread vacation properties had grown with UK travelers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Holiday ownership permitted families to use the equivalent unit each season, or swap their vacation periods with other owners who had units in different locations. About 600,000 vacation seekers took up that option.

The early surge was paired with a many reports about unscrupulous sellers deceptively promoting investments. They became a staple on public interest broadcasts.

The standard vacation property deal tied investors in for decades.

At that time, those owners who had used their assigned property in the sunshine for 20 or 30 years were ageing, and a large proportion were looking to wave goodbye to their holiday properties.

A number had declining mobility and found it difficult to access their properties. Others just thought they'd achieved their goals from them. And others had died, in many cases passing on their heirs to inherit the contracts - plus their yearly fees and upkeep costs.

The Investigation Progresses

This was the situation the family member had been placed. She looked online for options and came across SMT, a firm whose digital platform claimed to terminate her deal.

However, having submitted funds and arranged an appointment with them, her relatives had doubts.

Subsequent checking uncovered hundreds of people reporting they had paid money and achieved no result in return. Actually, they had suffered financially. A lot of it.

The reporting group began investigating what was happening. It was rapidly apparent that there were dubious individuals operating in the holiday ownership market.

One lawyer had hundreds of individual complaints preparing to take action against the organization.

We spoke to people who had used the firm and they all told the same story. They assumed the firm would purchase their timeshare away from them but when they participated in a session (for which they made an advance payment) they were informed there was no potential buyers.

Rather, they were pushed - indeed compelled - to spend more money acquiring "Monster Rewards", linked to the organization's holding firm, the overarching entity.

The nature of these rewards was rather ambiguous. They sounded like a form of credit, offering discount travel and benefits and shopping deals.

And they were apparently "transferable with additional holders, some time down the line.

Investing money up front now would lead to an long-term benefit that would pay for the firm's costs and allow the timeshare holder ahead financially, liberated eventually from their pesky contract.

An unbelievable offer? Indeed, it was.

A 'Deceptive Tactic'

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

This is known as a "misleading sales."

An operator - in this case SMT - "lures the customer by promoting a particular product but then to state it cannot be provided, steering the client to a different, lower-quality offering.

This is against the law. Equipped with all the evidence we had assembled, we made the case to secretly film one of the organization's sessions.

This takes dedication, work, and strong justifications for why this is the exclusive approach to collect the data needed to prove wrongdoing.

Once authorized, our small team organized a meeting with one of the organization's staff in the English town.

Posing as a member of the public hoping to get his mum free from her timeshare contract|holiday ownership agreement