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CB Timeshares and Vacation Rentals Review of Monster Vacation Club
Monster Vacation Club

Monster Vacation Club review: Scam 1

E
Author of the review
9:57 am EDT

We went to a presentation for what we thought was a membership in a vacation club. If we joined this club we would be able to access condo, cruises, and resorts that we could rent for $299 for a 7 night/8days visit. Sales pressure was very high and we were never left alone to discuss joining this club. When we asked for privacy to discuss, the guy left and another took his place. They told us over & over this was a vacation club membership and they were not connected to a Timeshare group. MVG would even finance our loan at 0% interest and if we were not happy then they would refund our money. Great! We were taken to an office and documents were presented to us to sign. Just a lot of legal steps(right). We would have to sign a license agreement to be able to use the software to search their listings. The software upgrades were to be $199 per year. So we paid $2, 500 down and financed $3500 at 0% interest. No mention that we had three days to cancel(knew we were leaving the next morning).

Sounds pretty good doesn't it. Well here is the truth of the matter.
There is no club membership. You are buying a software license to search listing where the $299 places are out of the way places that no one wants to visit. MVG does not finance the load they outsource to Universal Account Servicing, LLC (rudest people I have ever had to chance to speak to). Software upgrades are $299 for the first year with a 10% increase every year. When I asked to cancel the club membership(written, certified letter)they did not pick the letter up. Next I sent it in a letter and Ian called and when asked about refund statement was "you do not have that in writing".

We are still trying to get out of this but I do not know if that is possible. Bad thing is that the lone person in the Welcome Center at Myrtle Beach sent us over to this group. Does anyone have any suggestions about canceling this? Yes, we know we are stupid people to have fallen for this scam.

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Sady
, US
Oct 03, 2011 7:13 pm EDT

We had the exact same experience. The owner, actually got down on his knees next to me begging me to join. Against my better judgement (my husband thought we would recoup our expense by taking a cruise) we joined. They promised to keep it "in house" so it would not go on our credit record. (Like you, found that we could do better on our own directly to the resort and that the resorts were out of the way - left over timeshares) They did send our account out to Universal, but after me raising a fuss, they did keep it in house until we paid what we had owed, but then they sent it to Universal for the annual maintenance fee. They gave them my credit card information, which I did not authorize them to pass on. We decided it was a big waste of money and decided this year to cancel our membership. But Universal had already used our card. I too, sent Monster a Certified Letter to cancel my membership which they refused to take after three tries. Since mine was on a credit card, I contacted the credit card company and explained the situation. They did remove it from my account. I then changed the credit card number that they had for us.