Senior citizens who have timeshares are now major targets for a Mexican drug cartel. While the cartel handles bad food illegal activities, they have been successful in targeting unknowing retirees and swindling them of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to the FBI, the Mexican cartel has been very successful in scamming people of their hard-earned money. In fact, they have recorded a loss of about $288 million through several types of fraudulent scams.
This leaves the senior citizens broke and in debt, and the U.S. government is trying to warn people about scammers.

The Jalisco New Generation is one of many groups that are targeting elders and their timeshares in America. According to authorities, they are front runners and the main criminal group behind these scams.
However, they are smart and run both legal and illegal jobs in the country, slowly working their way into the Mexican economy. Therefore, they are harder to catch.

About 15 years ago, a group of Mexicans created the Jalisco New Generation. Since then, the organization has become one of the most powerful illegal cartels in the entire country.
Their legal sector sells avocados to people in the United States. Their illegal sector sells drugs and scams people of millions of dollars every year. Their target audience is mainly elderly people.

The cartel does this quite easily and effectively. A member will pretend to be a sales employee and call up a timeshare owner. Then, they offer to buy up the person’s timeshare investments for a large sum.
They ask for upfront fees and continue to collect money from them, promising a huge return soon. However, this never comes.

The cartel sets up this scam quite easily. They hire people to work in call centers in Mexico and give the employees a script to try to win over their respective targets. They also get the information and phone numbers of timeshare owners through illegal means by bribing people who work at Mexican resorts. Then, they do their research to see if the victim has enough money for them to take.

More often than not, the senior citizen wires a large amount of money to a Mexican bank to pay for advertising expenses and government fees. Then, they wait to earn double that amount back once they sell the timeshare.
However, this is where things start to go badly. They continue to send the cartel money unknowingly, and later, they start to realize that something is wrong. Usually, it’s too late by then.

Once they realize something is amiss, the so-called sales representative disappears, and they can no longer reach them. This is when people usually realize that they have been scanned.
Sadly, they cannot get this money back as they were sent to Mexican banks. Furthermore, the U.S. government can not also demand the return of the money as it now lies in another country.

According to the FBI, there are many Americans who have fallen victim to these scams. They have also documented about $288 million in timeshare scams. While a high percentage is by the Jalisco New Generation, some are attributed to other cartels.
What’s more, the FBI thinks that the amount is higher than $288 million. However, most people are too ashamed to come out with their stories.

While these scams are only a myth to some, research shows that they are really common among Americans. The only reason why most people don’t know about it is because people don’t usually share their stories.
James and Nicki, a retired couple, were victims of this scam, and the cartel scammed them by telling them that a wealthy Mexican businessman wanted to buy their Lake Tahoe, California, timeshare.

The agent told the couple that they would help them broker the deal with the businessman. Then they began to ask for money from them, citing thin slime registration costs and a slight infarction. Then, the agent lied to them, saying that the Mexican government was fining James for some violations.
The unsuspecting man sent more money to resolve that issue.

In total, James and Nicki sent about $900,000 to different Mexican banks. Now, their entire savings is gone and they are in debt. James is too embarrassed to even tell his daughters about it. “I’m sure that if I were asking them, they’d say, ‘How could you be so stupid?’” he explained. “And I asked myself that same thing. I used to think I was fairly intelligent.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. government can do little to nothing for these timeshare holders. The FBI needs the permission of local Mexican authorities to investigate these scams, and that is harder to get than most people realize.
Therefore, the U.S. government has been trying to warn elders against falling for these scams. The U.S. Treasury Department has also put sanctions on many Mexican companies and their employees.