Homeowners Suspected That HOA Management Was Trespassing On Their Property, So Once They Had Video Proof They Took It To A Board Meeting And Got Somebody Fired

Trisha Leigh

3 months ago

Source: Shutterstock/Reddit

There’s nothing more frustrating than thinking someone is messing with your property, but not having the cameras (or camera angles) to prove it.

Once you do have the proof, though, it can feel like you’ve won the lottery.

Find out what happened when this guy and his dad caught their HOA’s management company damaging their property just to write tickets.

HOA vandalizes fathers truck, gets immediate justice.

Our HOA has always been known to be sneaky and to flat out give false accusations on homeowners. Especially in this day with security cameras and we can pretty easily spot out who the investigators are.

Most recently a homeowner was told she was supposed to get approval before she started re-shinglinlg her roof. The thing is? Her roof hasn’t been re-shingled in 10 years, and she had no plans to do it.

Things like that. Call it just a mistake, call it malicious.

Well a few years ago, we had our time to shine.

An incident of car smashing led to them installing security cameras.

It was a simple morning, I was still temporarily living with my father at the time.

Well one morning we decided to go out to get groceries, when we found that his pickup truck had been smashed into.

Nothing was taken, it was just smashed into.

In fact, I still have pictures from that day, just before the cops arrived.

Cops arrive, they do some investigating, and found that a rock inside the truck was from a house down the street. Unfortunately they couldn’t get them to admit to the crime, nor could they prove it was even them.

Understandable, criminals will grab things that they find, but it was suspicious. (The rock I should say was a special kind of rock that no one else in the neighborhood had, some round polished type. Very unique.)

After this incident, I installed a security camera on his house.

Then they got a notice of violation for the damaged vehicle.

Well, not two days later we got an HOA violation for a vehicle eye sore that needs to be removed. JUST two days later.

I’m confused how such a letter could have been written up so fast, but I started to suspect foul play.

One day we were home and had a knock at the door. The HOA actually called a code inspection officer!

The week hadn’t even been over yet, so the parts to fix the truck weren’t delivered yet.

(we weren’t paying expedited shipping for damages we didn’t cause, and the truck was so old Insurance would probably just total it, the truck is sentimental to him so he wasn’t going to get rid of it. It still ran great!).

Code inspection tells my father that vehicles which do not run need to be removed.

That worked out ok, luckily.

They both stop talking and take a second, and both almost say at the same time: “Don’t I know you?”

Turns out the code inspection officer went to the same church as my father, and knew each other!

This isn’t the malicious compliance yet, we are only just beginning.

The officer tells my father if he can show the truck starts, he’s going to write it up as being in code.

My father starts the truck just fine as the engine isn’t damaged.

He tells him to go on with his day and to have a good one.

Their suspicions were growing.

At this point, we are furious because we are starting to suspect the HOA may have did this as there’s no way they could have possibly known so fast.

Unfortunately OUR turn of the street had no neighbors with security cameras until I installed one on our house, so it caught nothing specific to our incident.

Down the street these people supposedly broke into a car as well but the camera on their house was unable to see anything.

Here’s where the fun begins.

Fast forward a couple months after nothing happened, I decided to install a new dash cam in my car.

I found a good one that uses very little power off the battery, and can activate if there’s any bumps to the car, even if the car is off (it just needs to be wired straight to the battery for this, it’s a Thinkware).

Then they got coded for a “crooked mailbox.” Seriously.

A few days later we got a violation notice for our mailbox being crooked. It wasn’t crooked much, but I do remember it recently having an angle.

Odd, I could just fix it, but………my car was aiming STRAIGHT at the mailbox!

I’m thinking, no, this couldn’t possible, it only records if there’s a bump.

But this time he had proof.

I take out the memory card, and apparently I either didn’t configure it correctly, but it was recording the whole time, it never went into sleep mode.

I watched, as the investigator walks up to the mailbox, and PUSHES it crooked, then writes down on his tablet his findings and takes a picture for records.

I’m appalled at what I see. I HAVE THE PROOF I NEEDED!

Finally the day of the meeting arrived.

Now, for the malicious compliance.

They wanted us to come to the board meeting and present what is going on at our address.

We haven’t told them yet that we had the pictures, but to summarize real fast how our HOA works, the board hires an outside company to do the grunt work, let’s call it Bentry Management.

We go to the meeting, and sit down. Bentry Management has the one in control of our account, and I swear to you she looked like a Karen, so the name fits for her.

She says they are absolutely making things up.

As time goes by in the meeting, we get to discuss what is happening at our house.

We present the timelines and tell them about the truck being smashed, and just two days later we get a letter. We ask what dates the investigator was out for that time.

Karen refuses to answer it. She argues ignorantly that we should “Keep better care of our stuff.” as if it was our fault.

Then comes the mailbox incident. We tell her that we have reasons to believe that the investigator is the one that is causing damages to our property, and is harassing us.

Karen denies this and says that is impossible, and that she knows him personally.

“Oh? Is that so?” I ask.

She says “Yes, why?”

I then pull out my laptop out of my book bag that I had been hiding, open it up to the video file already loaded, and show it to the entire board.

Which is when he pulls up the video for all to see.

“Enter exhibit A!” I said out loud, and played the video.

Karen’s face is bright red. She says that is not her investigator.

I then ALSO pulled out the letter about the mailbox, which was complete with date. It matches the cooked on time stamp on the video.

She still tries to claim it’s not them. “No, it’s a coincidence, I’m sorry but you have a vandal and it’s not us.”

It’s not? Hmm.. I let the video play, knowing she’s falling into a pit hard right now.

As the man walks towards my car, you can plain as day see “Bentry Management” on his shirt.

She’s no longer red now, she’s white as a ghost. The board looks over at her and asks what she has to say about this.

Karen is silent, and has nothing except a few noises which I assume was her brain trying to comprehend what just happened.

A neighbor even came through in the clutch!

I then proceed to bring up a previous case which I happened to remember before we left for the meeting, where we had a grass violation beside our house.

Now this area they were claiming was actually not visible from the sidewalk due to the houses shape.

I asked point blank: “Has at any time, your investigators walked on our property, illegally trespassing?” (knowing as per their rules, they aren’t allowed to do that.).

Karen is visibly shaking now and mutters out, “No, of course not.” with her head down, unable to maintain eye contact with me.

She probably feels that I have more evidence, but unfortunately I didn’t.

So I ask again. She asks “Why?”

OUR neighbor, whom are lawyers (literally next door to us where the side of this wall was), stands up, and says “Actually that’s not true, I have witnessed one of your investigators go between our houses and poke around the trash bins.”.

Bingo! I didn’t even realize she had this information, I couldn’t have asked for more better timing.

Karen at this point just starts arguing with our neighbors about no proof.

The board proceeds to apologize for the incident and they were going to discuss what is going to happen in the future about this.

At that point, the meeting is over.

She was rightfully fired.

A month passes and we get a letter that a new person will be in charge for Bentry Management, and new investigators.

She was fired that night!

Since she was fired, my father tells me we only get the occasional blip of errors, but they correct it immediately and don’t bother us really anymore.

Another day of winning against the HOA.

I bet Reddit is super satisfied by this one!

The federal government doesn’t mess around.