The estate agent’s name was one I recognized because she’d been at the closing. She had been the person who handed me the keys and congratulated me on my first house. I called her and asked whether she had ever contacted the HOA on my behalf before the sale. She said she had only sent the documents the title company requested. I asked whether she had received an estoppel letter showing the balance was zero, and she said yes, that’s what the HOA had provided. I told her the HOA was denying that it had ever issued the letter. There was a long pause, and then she said she would look through her closing file. Twenty minutes later she called back and said the letter had been emailed to her from the association’s official address four days before closing. I asked her to forward me the original email with the headers attached. She did. The sender address was correct, the signature matched the association president’s name, and the attachment had been created on the same day. But the metadata showed the document had been generated from a computer that wasn’t at the HOA office.
My lawyer requested the association’s email access logs for June. The HOA initially said they couldn’t provide them because the management company handled the account, but the management company eventually produced them after my lawyer sent a formal demand. There were only three logins that month. Two belonged to the president. The third belonged to the estate agent. I asked why the estate agent had access to the HOA’s email account, and the management company said she didn’t. Then they checked the IP address attached to her login. It wasn’t her office. It was the same office suite where she handled the estate’s closing documents. That meant somebody had used her credentials, or she’d been given access without anyone documenting it. My lawyer then compared the timestamps. The HOA’s zero-balance letter was sent at 9:14 in the morning. The estate agent’s account logged into the HOA email at 9:12. Two minutes later the letter was sent to the title company. Then, at 9:19, the account logged out.
We went back to the estate agent and asked her whether anyone else in her office knew her password. She said only one person had ever asked for it because they needed to access a closing file while she was out. She gave us the name. It was the attorney who had represented the deceased owner’s estate. My lawyer pulled the probate records and found that the attorney had also represented the HOA in an unrelated matter the previous year. Then we found the payment trail. Four days after my closing, the estate’s account paid the attorney exactly $19,000, with a memo that simply said “final settlement.” The $19,000 was the same amount the HOA was now claiming I owed — and the payment had been made before I ever bought the house.
