A family has reported to a National Police station in Madrid an alleged scam involving the rental of a tourist property in Les Rotes de Dénia for four weeks: the last week of June and the first three weeks of July. Their information is being concealed for obvious privacy reasons, as well as because they have acknowledged to feeling “very scared” about what transpired.
These were individuals who had previously rented vacation homes in Dénia. On this occasion, a friend gave them the contact information for a broker who dealt in this type of business and had a villa for rent advertised on a well-known travel platform. However, after a messaging exchange, they agreed to close the contract outside of the platform in order to acquire a lower price, which amounted to €13,000 for those three weeks.
According to the police investigation, the intermediary then forwarded them the contract in question via an email address (which is extremely similar to the name of a tourism website that rents out houses in Dénia and other cities). He also notified the complaining family that they needed to pay an initial investment of €5,200 by bank transfer to the intermediary. The family made the deposit.
The accused then advised them that they needed to make a second transfer to a bank account other than the one specified in the contract. He informed them that he would be gone on vacation for a few days and that a colleague would take over management of the villa rental. The complainant paid the next payment to the previously specified second account the next day. In this occasion, the transfer totalled 6,800 euros.
The owner “backs out”
However, everything went wrong a few weeks later when this second middleman called the family to advise them that the owner of the villa in Les Rotes had backed out and no longer wanted to rent the property, so he was looking into “other alternatives” for them. However, the complainants made it clear that they only had a few days till they could move into the villa and did not want to spend their vacation anywhere else. Naturally, they sought the entire amount they had paid him. But the mediator refused. All of these discussions are in the hands of the police.
As a result, the family, who would have lost 12,000 euros in total due to these two transfers, is now without that money as well as the villa where they had planned to spend their vacation. They have also expressed their understandable “desolation” over what occurred, stating that these events are equally harmful to Dénia’s tourist image.
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