Beware of scratch card sharks bearing gifts

Mr Joe Dalton and his wife were handed a scratch card by an Irish holiday club agent while on holiday in Lanzarote in January 2002. Suddenly, the agent "started jumping up and down" telling them they had won a free holiday.

They were invited back to the club office to collect their prize and told they could join a holiday club for a discounted rate of £5,000 sterling (€7,052), but only if they signed up there and then.

The deal was to include an unlimited number of cheap holidays for a period of 10 years.

"They were really professional and really slick," he says. "There were champagne bottles popping everywhere all of the time. It took so long for us to sign up, I actually wondered if that was a scam, because everybody else seemed to be signing up so quickly."

Nevertheless, impressed by the offer of five-star accommodation at knock-down prices, the Daltons paid a deposit of £1,500 by Visa card.

When they returned home to Ireland, they paid the balance of £3,500.

Mr Dalton waited for the company, Club Class Holidays, to issue a personal identification number (PIN), which they could use to log on to their website and book holidays, and a certificate that was supposed to guarantee that they would be paid back £4,500 of their signing-up fee after four years.

These were supposed to arrive within 28 days but several months later, Mr Dalton was still waiting.

"I really wanted to book a cruise in the Caribbean," he says. "The cruise was supposed to be free, but then I found I had to send off a booking fee to a different company for £346, so that's gone too."

The PIN eventually arrived in a pack containing branded stationery, but when Mr Dalton logged on to the website, he found no sign of the special offers he was told would be available.

One offer of a week in an apartment in the Canaries for £100 sterling seemed appealing, but when he tried to book flights through the company he was told he would have to fly from Cork to Dublin to Stansted, then on to the Canaries.

"Three flights, just to go to the Canaries, and the cost was astronomical. We were supposed to be getting the cheapest flights going," Mr Dalton says.

"They said they would need four or five months' notice before booking flights. This was not long after September 11th: no one was travelling then at all."

One condition of the original "free" holiday was that they would have to spend a day looking at timeshare properties. "If you didn't comply, you are told you will have to pay for the whole holiday," he says.

"You are constantly coerced into buying something."

Discovering that holiday clubs were duping consumers all over Europe, Mr Dalton demanded a full refund, but to no avail.

Mr Peter Baker of Club Class Holidays agreed during a phone-in on RTÉ's Joe Duffy show last year that Mr Dalton had been misled and invited him to complain. But, since then, Mr Dalton's letters have been returned as "person not known at this address".

After further failed attempts to contact owners of the clubs involved, Mr Dalton says he has given up hope that he will ever get his money back.

For his £5,346 sterling outlay, Mr Dalton has got nothing from the holiday club companies except a diary, a pen, a calculator and a lot of empty promises.

"Everything they said to us was false," he says.