Vacation Property Marketing (Management) Have I been scammed? VPM took lots of money to advertise my timeshare but now I can't get in touch with them. Kissimmee Florida

My husband and I decided to rent out our timeshare this year as we are super broke and won't be able to use it and it would be a big waste, plus the maintenance fees are a big burden (don't buy a timeshare unless you are really rich, trust me). We contacted Vacation Property Marketing (I swear they used name Vacation Property Management before but now this name does not appear anywhere).

So they offered to advertise our timeshare for rent and sale for a one time non-refundable membership fee of $685. It's a lot of money so I started researching the net to find out if it's a legitimate company. I've been scammed before (by scammers feeding on people desperately needing a job) and I did not want to fall for pretty promises again but I could not find anything on the company. BBB didn't have their info, no scam reports, no complaints. At least not with this name. Even their website http://onlinevpm.com/index.php seemed legitimate and had a stamp of trusted site by Online Business Bureau.

The representative we spoke with called himself Andy Pintos. He urged us to make the decision quickly as they had a convention coming and that would mean a lot of potential clients. We did the verbal agreement over the phone and they sent the written contract. When we talked on the phone, he told us, our credit card would not be charged until they receive the signed contract but guess what, it was charged right that day. The contract they sent us even included paypal receipt. The contract had lots of spelling mistakes in our names (they combined mine and my husband's names, wow), the name of town and address and, as I spoke with Andy later, the email address they had on file, which was supposed to be the means by which they would send us rental offers, was wrong too so I cleared that up with them. So what then? Then we wait.

And we've been waiting like that already for 5 months. We tried contacting Andy Pintos many times and can't get in touch with him. I just wrote them a mean message on their website so I hope they get back to me soon, wonder what they'll say. I'll update you on that.

Again, I tried looking for any signs on the net of people getting scammed by them but there's no reports yet. I don't know maybe it's just a new company that just haven't scammed enough people yet or maybe it's a legitimate company that is awefully bad at what they do and can't get me a renter because they're terrible advertisers.

A little update. I searched BBB again and found Vacation Property Solutions with very similar address (not identical). Rating is F but honestly I don't trust BBB ratings. But the important thing is they reported 2 complaints for selling practices.

Now, they also seem to have updated their listing as now they do have Vacation Property Marketing listed and I was right, they did change their name (from Information Management Forum - what a name! and I googled the name, some IT company uses it). And another reason why you should not trust BBB ratings, they gave them A-. Wow. No complaints on file.

I don't think there's any chance of getting my money back. I remember that the verbal agreement we did over the phone was recorded and had a lot of legal stuff in it, for ex. "Has our representative said that we have an offer for you right now?" I really hope that I am wrong about them and they are just bad at advertising and we can still get a renter from them... one day.

Has anybody else done business with them?

I guess that will teach us. Don't pay for services they didn't perform yet. Anyway. Thanks for listening.

Mom of one
Keasbey, New Jersey
U.S.A.