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Authorities have called it as one of the largest scams of its kind in the UK.

In all 14 defendants have been convicted for their role in a £28m plot to cheat over 3,500 holiday ownership investors.

The victims were keen to get out of age-old holiday ownership agreements and sought out assistance.

A large number were from 60 and 80. Over 500 of them surrendered over £10,000, and one transferred more than £80,000.

Those affected were exposed to aggressive presentations lasting up to six hours. They were left out of pocket, possessing useless fake "rewards" and continued to be bound by expensive vacation property deals they frequently were unable to use.

The Firm Central to the Fraud

The company at the core of the scam was Sell My Timeshare (SMT). They collected clients' cash to finance the directors' luxurious way of life of exclusive education, luxury homes and exclusive air travel.

The individual at the helm of the company, the main defendant, was given a 90-month sentence in January for fraudulent conspiracy.

Recently, his partner one of the co-defendants was one of the final three to receive sentencing.

She was given a two-year suspended prison term at Southwark Crown Court after confessing to financial crime.

This has been a extended wait and marks a huge win for the individuals who testified, the law enforcement and the Crown.

The Way the Probe Began

The initial awareness of the company emerged during the mid-2016. I was working in the investigations unit of a media outlet, producing documentary programmes.

A colleague noted that his parent had inherited the rights of a timeshare apartment in Spain and, after long-term use, had commenced searching to get out of the agreement.

It's worth mentioning how popular vacation properties had grown with British holidaymakers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Timeshares allowed people to use the identical property every year, or exchange their weeks with other owners who had apartments in other resorts. About 600,000 sun-lovers seized that opportunity.

The early surge was accompanied by a many stories about rip-off merchants fraudulently marketing properties. They appeared frequently on investigative TV programmes.

The typical vacation property deal tied investors in for decades.

In that period, those owners who had used their assigned property in the sun for 20 or 30 years were advancing in years, and many were looking to say farewell to their timeshares.

Several had health issues and couldn't get to their units. Some just thought they'd got all they wanted from them. And others had deceased, in many cases passing on their loved ones to take over the agreements - including their regular contributions and service charges.

The Undercover Operation Unfolds

And that's where the friend's mum had found herself. She looked online for answers and came across the company, a business whose digital platform assured to get her out of her deal.

But, having paid a fee and booked a meeting with them, her family smelled a rat.

Additional investigation uncovered numerous individuals reporting they had paid money and achieved no result in return. In fact, they had suffered financially. A lot of it.

The investigative unit began investigating what was occurring. It quickly became clear that there were questionable operators active in the vacation property industry.

A legal professional had many grievance cases preparing to take action against SMT.

We spoke to individuals who had dealt with the organization and they each reported similar experiences. They thought the firm would buy their property off them but when they attended a meeting (for which they paid up front) they were informed there was no potential buyers.

In place of that, they were pushed - indeed compelled - to spend more money acquiring "the company's points system", named after the organization's holding firm, the parent organization.

The precise definition was not exactly clear. They sounded like a kind of currency, providing discount travel and services and retail offers.

And they were apparently "tradable" with other owners, at a future date.

Investing money at the time would result in an future return that would cover SMT's fees and allow the timeshare holder with a gain, released finally from their pesky deal.

An unbelievable offer? Certainly, that proved correct.

A 'Bait-and-Switch Tactic'

Assuming these reports were correct, this was a massive scam.

It's what is called a "bait-and-switch."

A business - in this case SMT - "baits" the customer by advertising a specific service and then claim it is unavailable, pushing the client towards another, inferior product or service.

That's illegal. Possessing all the accounts we had gathered, we presented the rationale to secretly film one of the organization's sessions.

This takes dedication, work, and clear arguments for why this is the only way to collect the information needed to confirm deceptive practices.

With approval secured, our limited crew organized a meeting with one of the organization's staff in the English town.

Posing as a ordinary individual wanting to help his mother out of her timeshare contract|holiday ownership agreement