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A GEORGIA veteran is seeking help after claiming that his HOA made off with his family’s insurance money after their new condo burned down.
A total of 24 families lost everything in a fire that consumed the entire condominium complex in South Fulton County in January 2020.
But only six of those families received insurance money from their Homeowners Association to cover the losses, according to local ABC News affiliate WSB-TV.
“These were his retirement funds we invested. No income, no condo – nothing,” condo owner Grace Smith said.
She and her husband, a retired Navy veteran, invested $25,000 in a condo in the Camelot complex in 2019.
When it burned down before they even had a chance to move in, their HOA promised a payout of $45,000, they claimed.
“And whenever [the HOA] did get a check, they were planning to buy out all the owners. So we came back to Dallas with that understanding,” Smith told local reporters.
When they had still received no check months after the fire, the pensioners drove from Texas to Atlanta to investigate.
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They decided to push the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office to look into Camelot’s HOA and were shocked by what they learned.
Police discovered that the HOA had received a check for $1.5 million just three months after the fire.
Now investigators believe that Camelot’s former HOA president Bettye Ligon and HOA treasurer Lyndon Baldwin Sr. wrote insurance payout checks to themselves instead of affected families.
That’s why Ligon and Baldwin have both been arrested and are now facing criminal charges of theft in Georgia, according to WSB-TV.
But for families like the Smiths, no immediate solution is available.
The retired couple was planning on using the condo as their retirement home, and after the property was burned down, were counting on the insurance money to make another pension plan.
Without those funds, the retirees do not know where they are going to live.
The Smiths are now trying to lobby state representatives to write legislation that could help prevent this type of HOA fraud from happening to other homeowners in the future.
When contacted for comments by WSB-TV, Baldwin said he was innocent and Ligon did not respond.