Brit couple conned out £2.5k through fake holiday scam turn detective to get Spanish fraudster convicted
A BRIT couple conned out of £2,500 by a fake holiday rental website have told how they turned detective and got a Spanish fraudster convicted.
Lucia and Peter Myers, both 54, from London, managed to get the conman, Alvaro Lopez Uribe sentenced to six months jail, plus return their money.
A Granada court found Uribe guilty of ruining their holiday in Majorca last year and then suspended the jail term on condition he re-paid the couple.
IT specialist Lucia told Sun Online: “I had to come over twice to Granada to finally get him convicted.”
She and husband Peter, who run a consultancy business, had handed over the cash via a bank transfer to pay for a one-week stay at an upmarket villa near Palma in 2017.
But just the day before they were due to fly out, they were told the villa was no longer available.
The couple, who were travelling with their two children, Julia, 15 and Alicia, nine at the time, were forced to book another villa at the last minute.
Incredibly, on an internet search for another rental they were offered the actual villa by the real owners and told that they had been the victims of a classic scam that has caught hundreds out over the last few years.
FAKE SITE
Lucia explained: “It turned out these scammers had simply stolen the pictures from the internet and set up a fake site.”
The scam is a popular one in Spain, where fraudsters often target Brit tourists with fake rentals.
She revealed how the fraudsters slowly gained the couple’s trust by initially saying other properties advertised on bogus site majorcaleksa.com were no longer available.
This made it look like the site was legitimate.
After losing out, Lucia vowed to get even with the conmen and over many months she traced the money her husband sent to a branch of La Caixa bank in Granada.
She contacted the bank, but a request for her money to be returned was refused as there were no funds in the account.
Lucia managed to find two other Brit couples who had fallen for the same scam.
One of them turned up in Majorca with their two kids to find they had nowhere to stay.
Determined that no-one else should fall victim to the site, she managed to have it closed down after making an official complaint.
She initially went to cops on the island and after much cajoling eventually they took on the case, with Lucia twice flying out as a witness to Granada.
The mum said: “The court paid the expenses, but I think the defendant’s lawyer was surprised to see me.
“If I hadn’t turned up, that would have been the end of the case.”
During the two year investigation she compiled a huge dossier of information – including details of a bank account in Valencia that was also used by the same scammers.
'PUT OFF SPAIN'
She said: “The authorities in Spain don’t seem to take this very seriously.
“But to my mind this is a big crime. How much money has been stolen from innocent people?”
Lucia added: “This puts us off visiting Spain. We have gone to Corfu instead for the past few years.
“Scams like this are not good for Spain – the authorities should realise this and make it harder for conmen to work online and easier for people to get their money back.”
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A home address given to the court by Uribe in Granada appeared empty this week.
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Neighbours told Sun Online they had not seen him for “some time”.
An official address for his “holiday lettings business” turned out to be empty with local businesses saying they had never heard of him.