The Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned four individuals and 13 Mexican companies linked to a criminal network led by the Jalisco Nueva Cartel Generation (CJNG) that was dedicated to defrauding US citizens with shared vacation properties in Puerto Vallarta.

According to OFAC, these individuals and companies are based in or around Puerto Vallarta, a popular tourist destination that also serves as a strategic stronghold for the CJNG, a brutally violent cartel, designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

According to the investigations, this network posed as telemarketers from Mexico “with very fluent English” and contacted owners of these accommodations, who were mostly elderly, to defraud them by posing as lawyers, real estate agents or representatives of some companies in the sector.

In this type of vacation accommodation, known as Timeshare fraud involves several people sharing the right to use a property for a specific period of time each year.

Victims transferred thousands of dollars in "dues or taxes" for supposed sale or recovery efforts, which later proved to be false.

Between 2019 and 2023, around 6,000 Americans reported losses close to $300 million from this type of fraud in Mexico alone, according to the FBI.

By 2024, the reports had already totaled another $50 million.

Beginning around 2012, the CJNG took control of timeshare scams in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico and surrounding areas. These complex scams often target older Americans, who may lose their life savings. The cycle of these scams can last for years, causing financial and emotional devastation for victims while enriching cartels," the Treasury Department said.

“We are going after the terrorist drug cartels, like the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, that are flooding our country with fentanyl,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “These cartels continue to create new ways to generate revenue to fuel their terrorist operations.” Under President Trump's direction, we will continue our efforts to fully eradicate these cartels' ability to generate revenue, including their attempts to prey on older Americans through timeshare fraud.

The U.S. Treasury announced that this action, carried out in collaboration with the FBI, the DEA, and Mexican financial authorities, freezes all assets in the U.S. of those sanctioned and prohibits U.S. citizens from any transactions with them.

The United States government emphasizes that the CJNG is considered one of the most powerful cartels in the world. It has carried out intimidating acts of violence, including attacks against the Mexican military and police with military-grade weaponry, the use of drones to drop explosives on Mexican law enforcement, and murders and attempted murders of officials.

In this regard, it states that in addition to drug trafficking, the group's main source of income, the CJNG also generates alternative sources of income through fuel theft, extortion, and timeshare fraud, as revealed in this investigation.