There’s an excellent column in the Las Vegas Review Journal about one of the sleazy cops who took part in the massive HOA corruption scandal. It’s linked below.
Also linked is an FBI press release on its long-running HOA investigation. Supposedly, this was a ten million dollar swindle, but now the FBI is using the figure $58 million. The real losses are many times that amount because the Leon Benzer HOA swindle helped collapse the Las Vegas housing market and an untold number of people lost their homes and life savings. Someday, some smart investigator will start calling it the billion dollar swindle, which it clearly was.
A financial firm has just filed with the SEC to buy and sell stock in a company that forecloses on HOA liens and foreclosures. You can now invest and make a profit on the misery of your neighbors. Definitely read the prospectus. And be ashamed for a country that allows this to take place.
Pagedale, Missouri appears to have learned the “tricks of the trade” from HOAs by turning homeowners into cash cows.
Most city codes do not allow for cars up on jacks in driveways or front yards. They frown on RVs, travel trailers, and eighteen wheelers parked in driveways. And peeling paint or a falling fence will no doubt be met with a violation warning letter. But the City of Pagedale has a line of homeowners waiting to pay fines for a BBQ grill in the front yard, a free-standing basketball goal on the driveway, or the wrong color of blinds in the windows. If the windows are missing screens it makes for another reason to fine the homeowners. Even an 84 year old woman has been ordered to change her window treatments or be fined.
A threat to all users of the World Wide Web is growing and it could catch all of us by surprise. The European Parliament is considering a change in copyright law that could impact hundreds of millions of websites. The same copyright changes have been suggested in the U.S. as well.
It’s called ‘ancillary copyright.’ Boiled down to basics, it means that websites violate international copyright law if they provide hyperlinks to other websites. In other words, if I give you a link to a publication that exposes a horrible HOA story somewhere I violate that publication’s copyright. The reasoning is horrible.
