Gen Zer Elected To HOA Board After Running As A Joke Uncovers Major Financial Fraud In Her Community
They say she needs to stop harping on the past. She says they're criminals.
Krakenimages.com | Shutterstock It has all the makings of a perfect zany comedy: Young woman runs for her HOA board as a joke, gets elected, and then immediately discovers a staggeringly long record of cooking the books. Also, she's a lawyer, and blonde: It's a "Legally Blonde" sequel that writes itself.
Except it's true, or appears to be anyway, given the wealth of receipts the young woman posted on her TikTok, where the beginning of her HOA tenure has turned into something that's really starting to look like a crime caper.
A Gen Zer elected to her HOA board uncovered evidence of financial fraud.
TikTok creator Ashley Grey's ascendance to her HOA board began as something right out of a "Seinfeld" episode: She'd had enough of one of the board members, jokingly threatened to depose them, made good on the threat, ran and, surprising everyone, actually won.
A lot of us would have resigned right then and there and been like "just kidding!" and slinked off back to our condos, but Ashley is built differently. She threw herself into the job instead, and it quickly proved her suspicions about the board's activities. It all started with absurd invoices for cleaning supplies.
The Gen Zer demanded to know why the board was regularly spending $6,000 on cleaning supplies.
The first thing to catch Ashley's eye was the condo board's absurd cleaning budget, regularly totaling more than $6,000 per invoice. So she demanded copies of the invoices. After being stonewalled for an eternity, the board finally supplied them with key information, like the amounts purchased, redacted.
Ashley was obviously not about to put up with this, so she pushed back and finally got a new copy of the invoices from the building manager that did include the quantities, written by hand in the margins with a pen. Not exactly convincing!
After finding out the vendor of the cleaning supplies, she went to the website and duplicated the cleaning supplies order on the invoices. They came to only around $3000, half of what the invoices showed.
Not only were the cleaning supplies orders more fit for an "NFL stadium for the season" than a condo building, in Ashley's words, but there were multiple invoices every month, all for $6000 or more. For instance, the invoices supposedly contained eight cases of toilet paper with 80 rolls per case for the bathrooms in the building's gym. That 640 rolls of toilet paper, three times a month, for two bathrooms barely anyone uses because… their homes are in the same building.
The HOA board is now suing her for uncovering what she says is embezzlement.
"As an attorney, this is embezzlement done poorly," one commenter wrote in regard to the obviously cooked books that Ashley discovered. But that wasn't even the half of it. She found all kinds of other discrepancies, too, like cleaning companies the HOA contracted that were no longer permitted to do business in the state.
What it all seemed to add up to was embezzlement, where someone misappropriates funds entrusted to them, in this case, inflating costs and pocketing the difference. Of course, when Ashley leveled these accusations, it quickly turned dramatic, with the HOA blaming a Black employee named Walter, who is supposedly "illiterate," and the mostly Latina cleaning staff, and eventually having the HOA's lawyers slap Ashley with a cease and desist.
When she refused to cease or desist, they sued her. Then, they made what appeared to be an attempt to undemocratically oust her from the condo board. Now, she has been forced to start a GoFundMe to pay for the legal fees resulting from the lawsuit.
This is an awfully incriminating way to respond to supposedly fallacious accusations of embezzlement, and an outrageous way to treat a homeowner who is actually paying for all the money you are so poorly managing that you had to correct invoices with a dang ballpoint pen.
And here is the point at which I remind you that, according to a 2024 study, most people who live under the dictatorship of an HOA hate it. The number one reason why? Mismanagement of HOA funds. Here's hoping Ashley and her attorney throw the book at this HOA board and get every (allegedly!) embezzled cent back, with interest.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
