Scam operator Victoria Cruises Line (VCL), which took deposits from Australians for a non-existent “world’s first affordable residential cruise”, is back – this time flogging Italian villa hotel membership and olive trees to rent.
For a monthly fee of AU$3,839 and a $10,000 deposit, passengers were promised a permanent home aboard a ship named the Victoria Majestic, sailing to 115 countries over three years but the ship never sailed and the registered operator Victoria Cruises Line LLC / Victoria Cruises Line based in Budapest, Hungary did not own or lease any vessel.
The company continued to push back its departure date which was originally scheduled for 2022, 2023, 2024, then July 2025 while continuing to collect deposits. Dozens of passengers, including Australians, who requested refunds are still waiting.
At least one successful Hungarian court judgment could not be enforced because VCL moved its registered base to Italy. The company operates through multiple corporate structures across Hungary, Cyprus and Italy.
A Victoria Cruises Line Resident’s Group on Facebook now has more than 220 members and is open to residents whose refund has not been paid (or is overdue), and for those doing their due diligence and attempting to verify the legitimacy of Victoria Cruises Line LLC.
The woman behind the scam, Viktoria Takacs, along with a man, Zoltan, who may be her husband, have now reportedly taken over an Italian olive estate business, with a registered address in Florence, Italy and the website degrassi-srls.com which claims to sell wine, olive oil, rent olive trees, and offer olive trees for adoption. Their Facebook page is entitled “Toscan Olive Garden”.
Villa Hotels is a membership-only private hotel “service” ranging from 199,000-299,000 euros per year. There is also a subdomain for a drone photography business, with the same physical address.
“The premise is basically the same as VCL,” stated a post on the Victoria Cruises Line Resident’s Group Facebook page. “They sell an asset they do not own and use images that aren’t theirs to promote it – this time on land instead of sea – and require payment via international wire transfer, in this case to a bank in Amsterdam, bypassing the required consumer credit card protection.”
Grok has red-flagged the site because of “extreme upfront fees for unproven ‘private’ properties with zero verifiable independent evidence of operation or guest experiences”; the registered Italian company is documented as a small producer of olive oil/wine, not a luxury hotel operator; classic high-pressure exclusive-membership framing (application review, discretion, not for the general public) combined with bank-transfer or card payment after acceptance; and no third-party validation, media coverage of the hotels themselves, or transparent ownership of the claimed properties.
