rSlash - r/Prorevenge I Hunted Down a Thief and Made Him PAY!

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

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Welcome to our slash pro revenge, where OP destroys a Theebing Homeowners Association. Our next reddit posted from Quiet Fangirl. My neighborhood doesn't have a homeowner's association, at least not anymore. When my parents first moved into their house, my older sibling was maybe 2 years old and I wasn't born yet. At that time, there was an H-O-A. The H-O-A took money from the neighborhood in exchange for their services. At first, and for quite a while, my parents just kind of shrugged it off. The HOA shoveled the snow off the streets in winter and dealt with trash collections, so they

were doing something worthwhile, right? No. The city controlled the snow plows and garbage trucks, not the HOA. But still, there was the illusion of effort. And besides, one summer they decided to contact a company to plant new trees all over the neighborhood, the fact that the company was owned by the son of the head of the HOA was totally coincidental. Those trees were the beginning of the end for the HOA. Why? Well, my grandma on my dad's side was visiting when they came around to plant the trees. My grandma is a certified master gardener, and so my grandmother stared through the windows

of our house as the guys planting the trees just dropped the saplings on the grass still with the roots inside the back that they came in. They didn't even bother digging a hole. They just plopped the sapling on the grass like a pathetic sad stick. The saplings laid there all night. No one came back to actually do their job and plant them. My grandmother mentioned offhand that those saplings were gonna die unless they got into the soil.

And then something clicked in my mom's head. She was paying the H.O.A. money, actual money every month. Meanwhile, she and my dad both worked, took care of two very little kids, sent us to daycare in preschool and arranged babysitters and fed us. And then the H.O.A. was going to pull this half-hearted BS instead of doing what she paid them for? No. No, F.ing, way.

So she showed up to the head of the H.O.A. House and basically demanded that the trees get planted properly like she's apparently paying for them too. The head of the HOA, so excited for someone actually caring about the neighborhood, made their second mistake. They asked if mom wanted to join the HOA. My mom agreed to join. From there the trees were planted, but most trees didn't make it. My grandma was right.

So first things first, my mom showed up to the next H-O-A meeting. There were like five people there. It's no wonder they asked mom to join. They desperately needed the people. My mom quickly found out that all the contractors the H-O-A called in were close relatives of other H-O-A members. So my mom started digging. She spent pretty much a full summer taking down the H.O.A. before she had to go back to

teaching in the fall. She dug through years of paperwork detailing the H.O.A.'s financial situation and she found something extremely enlightening. The H.O.A. didn't actually do anything. Well, they didn't do anything to benefit the community. Everything the H.O.A. claimed to do was either covered by the individual homeowner or by the city itself. So, they were collecting money from all the neighborhood residents under false pre-tenses. And, actually, they weren't even supposed to be in our neighborhood. Their association

zone was to a completely different neighborhood. So, what did my mom do? She went door to door with pamphlets. She went from house to house with her pamphlets, explaining the situation and how to stop paying for services that people would never get. Pamphlets that were, of course, written in both Spanish and English to account for the high amount of Latino and Hispanic people in our neighborhood. And, naturally, she got a lawyer and an accountant. It put a major dent in our pocket, but if it meant the entire neighborhood wasn't exploited for money each month, it was worth every penny. Another HOA member helped her sift through documents and data and pass out pamphlets and encourage people to show up to the meetings, but had to back out because of work related reasons. My mom rolled up to the courthouse flanked by the lawyer and the accountant.

She had more than enough evidence to get this H.O.A. that hell out of our neighborhood, and to expose those fraudsters for what they were, and to make sure that no H.O.A. ever came back into their neighborhood. It's been almost 19 years, and since then,'ve been completely HOA-free. Man, every single story I read about HOAs indicate that the only thing they do is just siphon money from everyone in the neighborhood to the owners of the HOA. I don't understand why anyone would want to be in an HOA. Our next Reddit post is from Michuguna.

This whole story takes place over the course of a year, from December 2016 to December 2017. The story begins with me needing to hire a contractor to repair damage to a pole barn that I was constructing on our property. The structure was partially done, until a storm hit and the structure received substantial damage. So we had a few contractors bid, and the guy who seemed to be the best one signed a contract and we started work within a week. We also signed with him to complete the structure after the insurance portion was completed because his crew could do this much more efficiently and a better job than we could do ourselves.

His crew completes the insurance portion of the job, but then abandons the project just before starting the rest of it. No call, no email, nothing. I called and texted and he never responded. At this point it was late December and we thought maybe he and his crew had holiday plans and they would resume after the holidays. Then another windstorm hit and his crew had embraced the partially completed structure correctly and it almost collapsed again. I tried for two weeks to find this guy. I even drove out to the address on the contract that we signed, which ended up being a house on a roll road in the next town over. I knocked on the door, seeing his car there, but no one answered.

I stopped by his house several different times trying to catch him. The last few times his car was no longer there, but the work truck of another company was. I wanted to know if he owned the house, so I even pulled up the tax records for it. The name on the house wasn't registered to him, so it sounds like he rented or at least was staying with a friend. The company info on the truck was registered to someone unrelated and not on the tax records. The tax records showed that the actual taxpayer of the property lived elsewhere, where I lived, the property name is listed,

and if they don't actually live at that property, their address that would have the actual tax bill sent to is also on there. Given that knowledge, I pulled the court records form to see if maybe he had been recently arrested, or if there was any other info. What I found was about 30 years of driving offenses, including a lot of DUI charges and

other records. At this point, I figured that he was long gone, and since I hadn't paid him for work that he hadn't done yet, I would just move on too. At least, until the structural engineer that I hired to assess the damage on the work that was done, stated that the structure had to be started over on that part, and that the building materials the contractor had left scattered around the job site were also unusable due to being improperly stored. I had hoped that the structure could just be pulled back into place and re-secured, but I was told that this wasn't the case.

So at this point, I was determined to find him. So far, his negligence had cost me $1,200 for a structural engineer opinion. $2,500 for the insurance deductible to the newest contractor hired to repair the exact damage that happened three months prior, and $7,000 in materials that his insurance company refused to cover or pay for. My insurance policy on their project didn't cover it either. The adjuster for his insurance company said that he was able to locate the contractor, but refused to give up any information for him directly. Because the project was never finished, this adversely affected my farm and boarding

business because two of my pastures that were connected to the building couldn't be used. This limited my ability to get natural pasture grass so I had to purchase hay, which gets quite expensive. Business notifications getting out of hand, buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages? Keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business, but simply, small

businesses run better on Thrive. Get Command Center for free today at thrive.ca. That's THRYV.ca. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. By the time the building was finally completed, I had losses of over $14,000. Because I didn't know where he lived, I used the only address I had for him for small claims court, which has a limit of $15,000. The court documents that I served came back undeliverable. This meant that I was kind of stuck

because a court date can't be scheduled until all parties are properly served. But how do I find an address for someone who never registers their address? So I kept an eye on social media for anything with this guy's name, which was a very unique name. Then one day this past fall, after Google searching his name again, there it was, his Facebook page. His name had never shown up before on any of my searches. I'm not sure what changed. And even better,

all of his settings were set to public. I could see everything that he wrote about, including his recent commitment to stay sober earlier in 2017, just after he abandoned my project. Oh, and I also found his employer's name. He had posted a picture of him on a job site and someone asked him where he worked now. He named the place. So, a quick Google search and voila! I finally got an address to serve him court papers too. So, I refiled with his newly found address, but I still needed a home address to enforce the judgment once I won the case. So, what did I do? Seeing that he was listed as single, I used a fake Facebook profile. I would use this account to get this guy to give me all the information I needed,

considering that he was middle-aged and single. To create my alter ego, I found a website of a cute blonde lady in her 40s. She wasn't too young for him since he himself was in his mid 40s. I just yanked her pictures. I only set one of those photos as her profile photo and would use the rest if he asked for more. I changed her profile to make it look like it was a typical page of an average 40-year-old woman. Oh my god, this worked and it worked so well! I used some information that I found on his page to strike up a conversation about stuff stolen out of his work truck in the alley behind his house, which was a big clue. And he had reported it to the city police department. He named the city so another big clue.

So using this information and telling him that I had grown up in the same area, I got him to give me a general area of where he lived. I kept conversation cool, like, is the pizza joint still there? They've been around forever, so he wouldn't get suspicious. Think goodness for Google Maps giving me a better idea of that area so I could talk about it like I did. In fact, grow up there. In reality, I've only ever been to that city twice. I was able to narrow down the neighborhood that he lived, and using that info, I pulled the police report records from that city.

There were three reports done within the same area on the same date that he reported. So using that information, I pulled the county tax records to see who owned the house. I found three houses in that area that could possibly be rentals since the owner's name and taxpayer billing address didn't match. This could be a long shot, but I didn't have anything to lose by searching. But just as I was about to start calling these people, he made a post to Facebook that made this completely irrelevant. He posted the name of his roommate in a status update, who I then check out the profile of. The profile lists the roommate's landscaping business. A quick Google search of the business name and bingo. This guy's

state business registration address matched one of the three addresses that I suspected to be his rental house. So now I had this guy's home address. He had already been served at his employer's address for the court date. Fast forward to the court date. As I suspected, he didn't bother showing up, so I got to fault judgment. All this time, I had been using the fake Facebook profile to get information about his life, his job situation, how much he made per hour, and the fact that he was looking at changing employers. He even told me the name of his new employer. This guy played right into my hands. Once I got the official judgment from the small claims court win, I decided to contact him myself on Facebook using messenger. I told him

that while I was angry at him, I was going to give him one chance to work out a deal with me. I said that I didn't want to go through the state, but if it came down to it, I would. And they would start garnishing his wages. They would take 25% of each paycheck after taxes. They would force the person's employer to do it for them and send the money to me. However, I hate making the state be the middleman because they just complicate things. So I told this guy straight up that if he refused to work with me, then I would go to that extreme and to shorten it up. He replied,

agreed, signed, and notarized a monthly payment agreement, complete with a list of manual labor tests that he could use in place of a payment or two to help with some projects on my farm. Wow, OP, that was almost… I don't know if NICE is the word because you did force this guy to pay you $14,000. But I guess it was nice of you to not completely ruin his life. That was our slash per revenge. And if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.