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What was supposed to be a dream experience, a three-year voyage around the world with Life at Sea Cruises turned into a nightmare for passengers after the cruise was cancelled a mere two weeks before its maiden voyage.

To make matters worse, many of the passengers had sold their homes, or quit their jobs to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel on a cruise with a 140-city itinerary over three years.

A group of 78 disgruntled passengers are now demanding a criminal probe into the company as they’re desperately trying to claw back $16 million (R302 million) in refunds. The passengers sent a letter to Markenzy Lapointe, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, on Tuesday asking his office to open a criminal fraud investigation into Miray Cruises, the parent company of Life at Sea.

“The majority of the residents are seniors over 65; collectively we have been defrauded out of millions of dollars,” the letter claimed. “The individual transactions range between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The letter goes on to state that Miray Cruises assured passengers that their deposits were not being used as ‘upfront capital’, but it later emerged in a memo from Miray Cruises CEO, Vedat Ugurlu, that the company “is not such a big company to afford to pay 40-50 million for a ship.”