Trade Show Travel Co Free Vacation Scam West Palm Beach Florida

If you signed up for a chance to win a free vacation from a travel agency at a trade show, specifically from the Ohio State Fair and you received a phone call saying "congrats, you won", don't bother calling them back. We got a call from a fast talking salesman named Mike from West Palm Beach, Florida in regards to a drawing my girlfriend entered at the Fair. After lots of congratulations and pointing us to a hastily made website with little to no content, he tried to get us excited for the free trip that we had won. A series of all expense paid trips for up to 5 people from a travel agency that combed through 10,000 entries and selected only 100 winners.

5 days/4 nights in Orlando

3 days/2 nights in Daytona Beach

Plus 2 Bonus Vacation destinations

After 30 minutes of smooth talking fluff and quickly paced repetitive reassurances of the travel agency's legitimacy, we were told that the only thing we had to pay for is $499 in travel fees. He explained that they don't pay for hotel taxes or travel, which was understandable. He told us he would discount it to $449. Then discounted it to $249 now and $249 later. He assured us we didn't have to pay for it before we got off the phone, then told us he couldn't hold the offer for us if we didn't confirm the trip (by giving him a paypal confirmation number) before we got off the phone.

He gave us a Booking number but wouldn't give us the emails with the relevant information until we paid for our free vacation, which we had to redeem on this phone call. They aren't allowed to have second conferences, only one phone call per 'winner'. He encouraged us to try and charge it on our maxed out Discover card and 'just deal with it later'. When we refused to pay any amount today, he got frustrated and said 'you guys shoudn't be going on vacation if you're broke'. He told us that if he wasn't legit, we could just call our credit card company and they can dispute the charges. He assured us that only legitimate businesses can be vendors at the Ohio State Fair since it's state regulated..  

Background: I've managed hotels and currently design websites for a living. I've been traveling the country representing various businesses at trade shows for the last 5 years. I've lived in West Palm Beach. I've been trained in Sales by a vast array of marketers, sales trainers, con men, and entreprenuers in every variation of hard, soft, and subliminal sales tactics. Several of whom were from West Palm Beach, which has the largest conglomeration of wealth in the US during the winter months, along with the largest conglomeration of skeezy fast-talking salesmen with get rich quick schemes and predatory scams. He qualified our position, diffused my objections, created a false time constraint, used our names repetitively to gain trust, gave us a plethora of contact information so we felt taken care of and did everything to make himself seem legitimate. I'm sure many people fell for it.

I've been trained to do what he does, better than he does it, and I can assure you, this is a scam.

The travel agency's website was established in March of 2016, but he claims they've been around for 17 years. It was built using GoDaddy's free Website Builder, but he claims he makes $28 per hour as a customer service manager in a legit travel agency.  The website has 4 pages, 0 external links (other than 1 to paypal and 3 social media dead-ends), and no payment gateway. The only way you can pay is by sending them a dollar amount through paypal directly. If you wanted to book a trip online, or even look into traveling with them, you couldn't if you tried. There's nothing there.

They have Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ with a few scarce generic posts; but not 1 single review.. in 17 years of alleged operation. The only info they have on the entirety of the internet is their cheap contentless website and three completely bare social media pages.

Once you send the money, call to schedule your trip, realize there is no travel agency and try to dispute the charges; PayPal will tell you that you entered the payment amount from your computer or phone coming from an IP address associated with your account, therfore you personally and manually authorized the transfer and there's not much they can do for you. They'll open an investigation, it will go nowhere, you'll probably never see that money again. Good luck.