“Seniors Beware!”
This is a blaring warning. The most important lesson to learn from the tragic story of 79-year-old Alfred Jeung. He committed suicide after making a disastrous series of Diamond Resorts timeshare purchases late in life.
As the wrongful death lawsuit against Diamond filed by Alfred’s children explains, Diamond makes it a practice to target seniors…not because seniors can afford timeshare purchases but because Diamond knows seniors cannot!
According to the lawsuit, here are some of the 24 deceptive tactics Diamond deploys to lure seniors into buying a timeshare:
“DIAMOND … serves as lender, only offering and pushing its own high interest loan products to finance the purchase of points beyond the elder’s ability to pay. These loans are often wildly unsuitable to the elder they are used with. DIAMOND purposefully ignores any assessment of the elder’s ability to pay.”
“DIAMOND also pushes DIAMOND affiliated credit cards to finance purchases of points, in some cases apparently applying for and charging cards without the advanced knowledge of consent of customers.”
“DIAMOND knows that elderly retired persons in particular generally do not have enough money from their social security and hard-earned savings to be able to afford DIAMOND memberships, especially at the higher levels.”
“DIAMOND readily ‘solves’ this problem by offering inappropriate financing to these elderly customers on fixed incomes so that the transactions can be pushed through before the vulnerable elderly persons are able to get independent advice and escape from the DIAMOND trap.”
The Diamond Trap! That’s what Alfred Jeung unwittingly fell into. Diamond sales agents used all of these tactics to strong arm Alfred into purchasing points he could not afford.
Why? Because there’s a great deal of money to be made by steering seniors into loans for timeshares that no responsible bank would finance.
“This approach is used to avoid any traditional credit analysis, such as debt to income ratio analysis to evaluate the elder’s ability to repay the loans, especially the predatorily high-interest rate loans offered by DIAMOND and its affiliates.”
The lawsuit shows how this worked in Alfred’s case.
Alfred purchased $50,000 worth of points with a Diamond loan that carried an additional $26,900 in finance charges.
The loan to purchase $29,000 worth of points came with more than $18,000 in additional finance charges.
The next loan for $42,686 contained more than $31,000 in additional finance charges.
And remember, it’s not just the loans. Diamond charged more than $76,000 in down payments to high-interest Diamond Resorts International MasterCards issued to Alfred and his wife without their permission!
“As such, not only were [Alfred] and his wife paying finance charges for the Membership purchases themselves, they were also paying additional finance charges ranging from 16.99% to 22.24%.”
“As a direct consequence, [Alfred] and his wife found themselves in an even more desperate situation than before. [Diamond’s] actions caused such mental distress and mental suffering in [Alfred] such that their actions were a substantial factor in bringing about [Alfred’s] suicide.”
It’s time Diamond stopped trapping seniors with high point purchases and high-interest loans they can’t afford – something that proved to be fatal in Alfred’s case.
Let’s let Mark Wang know. He’s the CEO of Hilton Grand Vacations, which purchased Diamond Resorts in 2021. You can email Mark at mark.wang@hgv.com
And Diamond is not alone. Other timeshare companies profit hugely by snaring seniors in the same way.
Jason Gamel is the President and CEO of the American Resort Development Association (ARDA), the trade association for the timeshare industry. Email him at jgamel@arda.org
Tell him his members need to stop putting seniors in financial danger.
If you suspect your timeshare company is stalking seniors like Diamond, use this list of ARDA VIPs to contact its leaders and tell them to quit before more seniors get hurt.
Did your timeshare company trap you into a high interest loan? Tell us how at info@timesharefacts.com
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