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Net closes on Spanish villa rental scam - 10 July 2009
The headquarters of a company claiming to offer villa rentals in Spain has been revealed as a postal box in a mail centre used by expats on the Costa Blanca to receive mail. This is the centre of an investigation into a scam involving customers from across Europe who have paid for non-existent villa holidays thought to total more than £1million.
The company, known both as morairaway.com and Paul Quinn Properties, is said to have taken hundreds of bookings in properties on the Costa Blanca which were all fictitious. Spanish police are investigating the company, and the Times has visited the company’s registered address in the UK only to find any trace of the organization long gone.
The average loss for families caught up in the scam is £3,000, but it is thought at least 100 families from the UK, plus others from Ireland, Belgium, Holland, France, Scandinavia, Germany and Russia, have been misled and seen their summer holiday plans ruined.
Spanish police, alerted by the newspaper’s investigation, have set up an inquiry into the company and the alleged fraud, but have so far only received ten formal complaints from customers. Anyone who has dealt with the company or feels they may have lost money in this scam are urged to contact the Spanish police on 0034 965 791 085, or the Thames Valley Police here in the UK on 0845 850 5505 (quoting reference 1158 – 30/06/09).
Paul Quinn Properties was registered as an estate agent in February of this year, but an address listed in Spain for the company also turned out to be false, though other customers at the Javea shop where the post office box the company lists as an address said they had seen what they thought were other people who had lost money asking about the owner of the box.
One theory is that the company started as a legitimate estate agent but then suffered from the global economic downturn and the fall in value of Sterling against the Euro which has seen thousands of estate agents in Spain go bust. It may be that financial pressures encouraged the decision to turn to the allegedly dishonest practices that have taken place.
The case also raises questions about the freedom of advertising this kind of service on the internet, as two of the leading holiday rentals websites in the UK carried advertising for the rogue website morairaway.com, and failed to pick up on the suspicious company until the website was shut down.
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