How BBC secret filming exposed a £28m timeshare fraud

Prosecutors have described it as one of the country's biggest scams of its kind. A total of 14 people have been found guilty of participating in a £28 million plot to defraud more than 3,500 timeshare owners. The victims were desperate to get out of decades-old timeshare jobs and began looking for assistance. Most were aged between 60 and 80. More than 500 of them lost more than £10,000, and one of them received more than $80,000. Those affected were held to high-pressure sales meetings lasting up to six hours. They were left out of pocket, owning useless credits, and already tied into costly timeshare agreements they often couldn't use.

Sell My Timeshare (SMT), the company at the center of the fraud, was a SMT company. They were unable to finance the owners' luxury lifestyle of private schools, millionaire mansions, and private jets with their money. In January, Mark Rowe, the man at the top of the company, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for conspiracy to defraud. Nicola, his wife, was one of the final three people to hear their sentences on Friday. After pleaded guilty to money laundering, she received a two-year suspended prison term at Southwark Crown Court. This has been a long time coming, and it represents a major win for the people who spoke out, the police, and prosecutors. I developed a programme for theBBC Scotland Investigatesstrand, which was exposed by clandestine filming the way SMT fleeced its victims. Nearly a decade later, the completion of the criminal process brings some solace to those who were thrown off. However, it's worth knowing how the robbers were able to get away with it for so long.

I first heard about SMT in the summer of 2016. I was working in BBC Scotland News' investigative team, assisting in the production of current affairs and investigative documentaries. A friend shared that his mother inherited the use of a timeshare apartment in Spain, and that, after years of holidays, she began to leave the relationship. It's worth noting here how popular timeshares with British holidaymakers in the 1980s and 1990s has been. Timeshares enabled people to use the same accommodation year after year or to swap their weeks with other owners who had properties in other resorts. About 600,000 sun-lovers took up that opportunity. A slew of reports about rip-off stores misselling homes was accompanied by a lot of news about ripped-off merchants misselling houses They became a staple of consumer and investigative television shows such as Watchdog and The Cook Report. For decades, the traditional timeshare contract had tied investors. Many owners who had enjoyed their timeshares by 20 or 30 years were getting older, and many were planning to say goodbye to their time shares by 2016. Some people were losing their mobility and couldn't get to their homes. Some people seemed to have everything they wanted from them, while others felt they'd gotten all they wanted. And some had died, in several cases, leaving their loved ones to inherit the contracts, as well as their annual payments and maintenance fees.

And here's where my friend's mother found herself. She looked on the internet for answers and discovered SMT, a company whose website promised to get her out of her employment. However, her family smelt a rat after paying a fee and booking a meeting with them. Hundreds of people said they had paid money but got nothing out of it, according to new reports. In fact, they had lost money. A lot of it. Our team began investigating what was going on. It became abundantly clear that there were some shady characters operating in the timeshare resale market. Hundreds of individual lawsuits were waiting to sue SMT, according to one lawyer. We talked to people who had used the company and they all told the same story. They hoped that the company would buy their house off them, but they learned there was no resale value when they went to a inquiry (for which they paid up front). Rather, they were encouraged - in fact, pressured - to invest more money in Monster Rewards, a brand name that was based on Monster Travel, the company's parent company. It was not immediately clear what these were. They sounded like a form of currency, providing discounts on travel and shopping products. Some time down the line, they were apparently tradable with other owners. Investing money up front will result in a final settlement that will pay SMT's fees and leave the property owner in profit and leave them freed from their pesky lease at last. Too good to be true? Well, yes.

A 'bait-and-switch' scam

This was a massive scam if these reports were true. It's what is called a bait-and-switch. Someone like SMT baits the customer by advertising a specific product or service only to later claim that the product or services are not available, leading the customer to a different, inferior, product or solution. That's illegal. We made the decision to illegally film one of the company's meetings with all the evidence we had gathered. This takes time, dedication, and convincing arguments for why this is the only way to gather the necessary details to prove wrongdoing. Our tiny staff arranged a meeting with one of the company's representatives in Stratford-Upon-Avon with the knowledge that we were granted permission. Our host, Fergus Muirhead, filmed the entire three-hour encounter as a member of the public attempting to get his mom out of his timeshare agreement. And it all went as we'd been told. Fergus was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement in the beginning, which was intended to prevent him from divulging anything that was discussed in the meeting. Any rumors that the firm would be able to sell the (fictional) property was quickly dismissed. The only way out of it would be through Monster Rewards, and to get them, he'll have to cough up £6,740 on the spot. We made our excuses and left in British journalism's great traditions. On October 24, 2016, we aired the program on October 24, 2016. We gave SMT the right to respond to our allegations regarding their unlawful business conduct in the run-up to transmission. They denied any wrongdoing and challenged both the accuracy and probity of our sources. Our allegations were defamatory, and they reserved the right to bring court action against the BBC. We didn't know until we announced the online news piece ahead of transmission that we didn'e know was that we had everything on tape. We never heard from them again. We were contacted by police who were still investigating SMT within days of broadcasting. They were trying to access our video of the recorded meeting. We must be cautious with handing over to the police reports that we have gathered for our reporting as journalists. We must remain independent, and without a court order, the BBC will not normally give over unused information in those situations. So we waited until they were given a court order for the item, which we then followed. And that was the last we heard of the case for the next three and a half years. 19 people connected to the company had been arrested as the nation entered the first Covid lockdown in February 2020. Fergus and I were invited to testify. We didn't know whether we'd be called or knowing what was going on for the next five-and-a-half years, or even knowing what we were supposed to hear. We learned there had been four trials in London over two years at Southwark Crown Court this week, but only at the end of the judicial process this week. Reporting limitations were in place until the final guilty pleas were submitted. In total, there were 14 convictions. Josephine Cuthill-Fox, 60, was one of those people interviewed in 2016, and she was one among those. She was sentenced to 24 months in jail but was banned for two years. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will now focus on obtaining the funds and assets gathered by the defendants as a result of their convicts' crimes. This story isn't over yet.