TS Today - Creating a Vision for the Future of Vacation Ownership Issue #142, Jul/Aug 2015 | Page 12

TimeSharing Today Page 12 Jul/Aug, 2015 ³¿VKLQJ´WDFWLFVWRJOHDQHYHQPRUHLQIRUmation out of you over the phone. :KHQ RZQHU ¿OHV DUH SLHFHG WRJHWKHU with other information gleaned over the course of several calls, these telemarketers FDQDPDVVVXI¿FLHQWSUR¿OHGDWDWRIRRORWKerwise intelligent, savvy consumers, leading to costly and potentially dangerous situations. What Telemarketers Know About You By Gregory Crist A Big Business Your phone rings. You look at the caller ID and it’s from a number you don’t recognize, so you don’t pick it up. Five minutes later, it rings again, this time from a local number. You answer and it’s a timeshare telemarketer who quickly uses the classic line, “We have buyers ready to go for a property just like yours today, we just need to verify some information.” Could this cold caller possibly be local or legit? Probably not. Timeshare owners like you are deluged with telephone solicitations and unTXDOL¿HGJXDUDQWHHVOLNHWKLVHYHU\ZHHN Not only do these companies know more about you than ever before, they also use special devices to cloak the company’s identity on your phone so you won’t know who they are. If this suspicious activity happening in the darkest areas of the resale market alarms you, it should. One might ask how FRQ¿GHQWLDORUSULYDWHLQIRUPDWLRQLVIDOOing into the hands of telephone predators who are poaching thousands of timeshare owners around the nation. Sales of telemarketing leads have beFRPHDELJEXVLQHVVDQGDUHKLJKO\SUR¿Wable for nefarious data brokers. What may have been sold as basic lists of timeshare owners yesterday is being merged with illegally obtained or stolen information. Unscrupulous timeshare resale groups pay top dollar to these data-service providers who VHOORZQHUSUR¿OHV This information contains a whole lot PRUHWKDQ\RXPLJKWWKLQNVXFKDV\RXU¿nancial and health data, which is certainly more than you should be comfortable with. The National Timeshare Owners Association began looking at fraudulent telemarketing, and dove into how this information is being acquired and sold on the open market. In this era of computers and automated ]