A Sunny Escape

davidrmac

In brief , we were duped into buying a holiday in Florida by a company we believe to be called Calypso who are based in Florida . They cold call contacted us on the 9th Sep and my wife foolishly gave her card details . She became suspicious and asked me to the phone . I quickly realised that this was an attempt to get us to Florida , cheaply , so that we could be bombarded by timeshare salesmen and I categorically told them that we were not interested . They were very aggressive and told me basically that I was unlucky because my wife had agreed and I should take it up with her !
On the 13th Sep over £700 was taken from our account . The bank stated that they could not do anything as my wife had volunteered her details , fair enough .
I contacted this Company and they stated that I would receive my holiday pack within 14-21 days and that I had a cancellation period of 30 days from receipt of the package , this call was made on 17 Sep .
To date , we have not received any information from this Company in any way shape or form .
My question to the forum is ;
Do I have a valid case for Visa Debit Chargeback to put to my Bank ?
We paid using a Lloyds TSB Visa Debit card from a personal account .

GraceCourt

American accent: "Congratulations! You have been selected..."

These calls are inbound calls using "predictive dialling" or possibly "random dialling" - the 9 that you press simply connects you with a call centre operator to be interviewed, so don't worry about a phone bill. As has already been stated here, this is a scam, designed to obtain your credit card details so that debits can be made for considerable sums of money without your agreement. The web site quoted changes over time, as sites are cheap to set up, it is currently http://www.asunnyescape.com. Note the common feature of these - the site registrant is always "Domains by Proxy, Inc", which is a shadowy front company through which you cannot find out any details of the real registrant, so that although you might be impressed by the pictures and the glamour, in reality it is just a facade that leads nowhere when it comes to trying to get your money back. "Calypso Cay" is also a common theme, as is the introductory message "Congratulations! You have been selected ... (etc)... press 9 to continue".

If you want to get your own back, press 9, and go through the entire discussion agreeing and answering all of the questions (with fictitious answers, of course). Make sure that you state early on that you have a Visa card as they don't seem to be able to make debits from an American Express account. Give the correct first 6 digits of your real Visa card (this is quite safe, it only identifies the issuing bank) but make up all the rest, and see how long you can keep spinning them until they hang up!

Names given by callers from this operation (almost certainly fictitious):
Jason Harris
Mary Daniels
Jacob Andrews
Justin Thomas
Travis Johnson

Added:
See http://boakes.org/ameri-scam/comment-page-64/ for a very revealing and comprehensive breakdown of literally dozens of web sites linked to this scammer - Altef Hemani (aka Alex Hemani).

GraceCourt

I had another of these calls today, it was a record - I kept the salesman ("Gabe") talking for over 20 minutes, and even managed to get him to transfer me to his supervisor! The CLI shown was 0017750005699, which is (775) 000 5699... area code 775 is Nevada (Western USA), not Florida (East Coast, USA), so go figure...

He was new... I managed to get him to come up with the name "Calypso Cay" even though he'd said that he was calling about "Summer Bay Resort" (http://summerbayresort.com), he also said that no licence was needed for a Florida-based company to sell holidays over the phone... I'm pretty sure that this is wrong.

The supervisor did, of course, hang up as soon as I started asking some hard questions about taking money from credit card accounts without authority and for amounts more than agreed on the phone, so these are hardly the actions of an innocent travel operator. And, of course, the recorded message is identical... it's the same scam.

Apples2

But it's a cold caller.........OF COURSE it is a scam!!!

clever_username

No offence but your wife needs slapping with a wet fish if she gave out card details to someone cold-calling her from another country.