It looks like our side won a small but significant legal battle. A federal judge has ruled that a debt collector’s law firm can be held liable when it presents false information received from the client. The debt collector had inflated its claim against a homeowner by thousands of dollars, the same thing HOA debt collectors do all over the country. Finally! Finally, a law firm gets smacked for false representation!
Now we need a case where the HOA itself is also found liable for hiring crooked debt collectors who use crooked lawyers.
I’ve written about this before. But here’s another great column from the Aspen Times. Wages are so out-of-control in this Eastern Hollywood Town, that the City of Aspen is using taxpayers’ money to pay for the maintenance of Homeowners Associations where all the ‘low-income’ workers live. The whole system is warped in more ways than can be easily discussed. But the columnist linked below does a pretty good job.
Homeowners Associations are a national scandal waiting to burst. But making the taxpayer pay the cost of keeping this scam going is just stretching the imagination too far.
My job is just too easy. Lots of people read this blog site and you’d think I’d struggle to come up with a new subject each evening. But with people around the country gradually waking up to the HOA scam there are stories everywhere about out-of-control Homeowners Associations.
The link below deserves reading. It’s a tiny Homeowners Association in Arizona that suddenly decided it needed two lawyers and a security guard at its annual meeting. The HOA hired a new management firm which is fining homeowners for a bizarre range of ‘violations.’ So homeowners suddenly have to pay fines, pay for unneeded lawyers and an unneeded security patrol just to make sure nobody protests the hiring of such people.
Life can be creepy.
Beware of buying property in the Carter Ranch Homeowners Association!
I don’t know much about swingers’ clubs. Yeah, I’ve been on a few vice raids in my career of such clubs. And one such raid was on a home in Greenwood Village, a super-ritzy HOA just south of Denver. Even for a hardened investigative reporter it was pretty eye-opening. So this headline caught my eye.
Swingers Club May Be Forced to Produce Guest List
Seems that an HOA lawsuit against a Texas homeowner may lead to some interesting discovery, i.e., the guest list of all those who’ve attended swingers’ bashes in the past few years. One doesn’t usually think of HOAs as being bawdy. But as a former Texan, I can say that Texans can be just as raunchy as people in any other state.
Still, this could be an interesting case, especially if the guest list turns up any Congressmen, Senators or certain HOA management officials. Any names come to mind?
Investigative reporters just LOVE websites like ScamBusters and Snopes. It saves us a lot of research time. Those sites are not always right and are subject to mistakes like most of the rest of us. But what a resource! Another of my favorite ones was CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.) But that last one is a little esoteric.
I’ve just learned from one of my frequent email contacts that ScamBusters actually has a blog post about Homeowners Associations. It’s not perfect but it shows how suspicions about HOAs is going mainstream.
