A Mexican Drug Cartel's New Target? Seniors and Their Timeshares

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One of Mexico's most violent criminal groups, Jalisco New Generation, runs call centers that offer to buy retirees' vacation properties. Then, it empties its victims' bank accounts.

Tourists in Puerto Vallarta, a popular beach town in Mexico, in February. Over the last five years, American timeshare owners were bilked out of $288 million, according to the F.B.I.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

By Maria Abi-Habib

Reporting from Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, cities in Jalisco state that are cartel strongholds.

Published March 21, 2024Updated March 25, 2024

First the cartel cut its teeth with drug trafficking. Then avocados, real estate and construction companies. Now, a Mexican criminal group known for its brutality is moving in on seniors and their timeshares.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

The operation is relatively simple. Cartel employees posing as sales representatives call up timeshare owners, offering to buy their investments back for generous sums. They then demand upfront fees for anything from listing advertisements to paying government fines. The representatives persuade their victims to wire large amounts of money to Mexico — sometimes as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars — and then they disappear.

The scheme has netted the cartel, Jalisco New Generation, hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly, via dozens of call centers in Mexico that relentlessly target American and Canadian timeshare owners. They even bribe employees at Mexican resorts to leak guest information, the U.S. officials say.

The scam represents the latest evolution of the Jalisco New Generation, which is entrenched in both illegal and legal sectors of the economy. With little more than a phone and a convincing script, cartel employees are victimizing people across multiple countries.

And even those employees are vulnerable to the cartel's ruthlessness.

Last May, the remains of eight young Mexicans who worked at a call center owned by the cartel were discovered in dozens of plastic bags in a ravine on the outskirts of Guadalajara, a city in Jalisco state.

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