Anybody who’s seen the ugly insides of the national HOA scam knows that Homeowners Associations are lawsuit machines. In most lawsuits and criminal actions Americans have access to the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution. In the typical Homeowners Association each member unknowingly contracts away that access. Bam! In Pennsylvania Dutch, “there goes the egg money!”
Throw away your access to Due Process and every lawyer within spitting distance knows there’s money to be had. Free money. Your money. Paint your door the wrong color and you get fined, liened, sued and you pay all the HOA’s legal expenses. Lawsuit machines. No other possible description.
Well, prosecutors in San Mateo finally nailed a 64 year old HOA manager. She’s accused of embezzling 2.8 million dollars from the Woodlake Homeowners Association. She’s facing a growing heap of charges while police continue to investigate her partner.
Suspect Susan Marie Lambert
My question is, how the heck do you steal nearly three million dollars from a bunch of condo owners? Do you just assume that because they live in condos they must be stupid? Let me put that loss in actual numerals: $2,800,000.00! Where do you hide it? It can’t be in your pillowcase. It can’t even be under your bed. It would completely fill one of those condo units you supervise!
A few musings and ramblings on this watershed moment for millions of Americans.
A watershed moment is a point in time that changes everything; like the murder of President Kennedy, the crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the moment the towers fell. We all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first saw the video of the attack on the World Trade Center. Since I customarily worked until two or three in the morning I was in bed when I got the phone call.
A huge jury verdict in Nevada was just awarded to a homeowner against two HOA collection companies. Across the country many HOA boards assess minor fines and liens against homeowners and then turn the accounts over to their law firms for collection. It’s so tempting for an ambulance-chasing law firm to turn to the easy profits of debt collecting. It’s not unheard of for minor fines to turn into huge foreclosures. Law firms add so-called ‘collection costs’, legal fees, interest and other such nonsense onto nickel-and-dime fines. It’s enormously profitable for such lawyers to have a buddy down at the county offices when the properties are auctioned off for pennies on the dollar. A whole roomful of Las Vegas lawyers are in jail right now for similar racketeering convictions.
Yep, that’s the quotable quote emerging from an HOA scandal in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
Residents of the Russett Community Association voted to throw out the top two board members who homeowners claimed were misusing HOA funds. True to form, the two board members voted that the recall elections weren’t valid because they weren’t approved by the board. Then they fought the recall election in court, and of course they spent neighborhood dues money to pay for their own defense. It happens in thousands of HOAs across the country!
