Woman Reveals How She And Her Husband Were Scammed Into Purchasing A $30,000 Vacation Package
“You may think you're dumb, but are you ‘buy a $30,000 vacation package scam’ dumb?”
@hellosummeredeen / TikTok; Mladen Mitrinovic / Shutterstock A woman named Summer took to TikTok to share the story of how she and her husband were scammed into purchasing a $30,000 vacation package. Fully intent on not buying the package at all, she claims they were duped into thinking that the package was too good of a deal to pass up.
The story has a happy ending, but she made sure to explain how everything went down, to begin with.
She claimed she and her husband were scammed into purchasing a $30,000 vacation package through a presentation.
“You may think you're dumb, but are you ‘buy a $30,000 vacation package scam’ dumb?” She starts her video. “Because Josh and I are.” She explains how, while she and Josh were in Punta Cana earlier this year, they were approached by someone who offered them a $300 voucher for massages if they would sit through a one-hour presentation.
“We're like heck, freaking yeah,” she continues. “We can say no at the end. We're still gonna get the certificate,” and so they had never planned to buy the package — but the presenters did their job and they fell hook, line, and sinker.
“So we go to this presentation, the guy that meets us, buttering us up, he's like, you guys are awesome,” she says. “He's like. Basically was like, we should go out tonight, like, trying to be our friend. We fell for it. We freaking fell for it,” and he wasn’t even the one giving the presentation.
The man giving the presentation was a British man with round spectacles, and he presented the three packages: silver, gold, and platinum.
He laid out the silver package — a $15,000 deal — and buttered them up a little, saying “You don't want that one, though. You don't want that one,” and proceeded to lay out the $20,000 deal. The gold package. But once again the man said “Don't get me wrong. It's really, really, really, really nice, but I can tell that you're the type of people — your platinum people.”
The platinum package was $30,000 and had better contents than the other ones. Summer and Josh, as originally planned, said it was far too expensive. Expecting this, the presenter punched in some calculations on a calculator and told them they could give them the package for $17,000 — nearly a 50% discount, only $2000 more than the Silver package.
This should have been a red flag, but they signed up for it anyway.
“I go on Google afterward, and I Google this vacation package called UVC. So many complaints. Everybody's like, ‘don't do it. It's a scam. Don't do it. It's terrible. You're gonna regret it. Worst decision I ever made.’”
They started asking other couples at the resort for help, and they struck gold.
“We start tapping people on the shoulder and going, ‘You buy the thing? Did you buy the thing? Are you a part of the thing?’” she says in part two of her video. “And some people were like, ‘oh, hell no, I would never do that.’ But we actually ran into a few people that were like, ‘yeah, we signed up. We love it.’ And then we ran into this one couple, and this couple really, really saved us.”
In order to afford the $17,000 package, Summer said she had to take out a loan, add a line of credit, and even opened a line of credit with a bank in Panama, but what the couple told them helped them figure out a way through without paying an arm and a leg.
They said they had gone back the next day and negotiated the package down to $5000 after telling them they wanted to cancel, and so Summer and Josh went to do exactly that.
“We go back to the sales office, we find our guy, and we're like, ‘hey, we want to cancel.’ The tone. The tone changed so much like that,” she said. “They were like, ‘oh, okay, whatever.’”
She claims that they were very mean this time around. Last time, they were offered drinks, but this time nothing of the sort happened. They negotiated the price down to $5000 in the same way the other couple did, and so they felt a little better about being scammed, justifying it by saying they were “slightly less scammed.”
Everyone falls for scams — part of life is learning from the scams you fell for so it doesn’t happen again. If you’ve never fallen for a scam, it’s because you learned about how to avoid scams from people who were scammed. People like Summer, who are doing the right thing and raising awareness about the kinds of scams that still plague people today.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor for YourTango who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.