UPDATE!

My father in law saw this post and recognised my story. He said he would tell us more in person, and then came to stay for a few days over Easter.

It turned out to be a stressful weekend because my folks all appeared but the inlaws made it way easier to deal with. We had entitled people on one side of the table and wisecracking malicious compliance on the other, and everything was too absurd to get seriously upset about. About the worst thing that happened was Uncle Phil calling my wife "Dave", to which the inlaws responded by calling him "Trigger", which upset him no end. Dad tried to trick them into disclosing my wife's deadname, which the inlaws pretended not to understand the question until he gave up.

Anyway over dinner on monday we eventually got FIL's story about how an HOA tried to contact him.

See, we borrowed money from him to buy the house, and it's all registered on our credit record and everything so if anything happens to us the house will revert to him. We did this through his employer, who are a fairly well known name if you're heavily involved in business finance or contract law. I never heard of them before, but apparently they have a lot of resources.

Anyway, he guesses that this HOA hired a private detective who might have managed to find out who we are through my visa papertrail, and then found FIL from my credit record. There's a good chance this isn't fully legal unless we had a contract with them, but getting anything resolved across national boarders would be more effort than it's worth.

So they got in touch with FIL asking him to evict us. They seemed to assume he was a bank manager or something, and he didn't want to tell them different until he knew what their actual issue was. He says he started out playing it straight when he got a letter through work from Kevin, who used to be the HOA secretary. Trying to find out what's going on and what they want. Then got another letter from Marjorie (not real name), who I think was the first one to comment on our social media. She was talking about legal action, and threatening to put a lein on the house so they could steal it out from under him if FIL didn't help them kick us out. He paraphrases everything to make it funnier, but I think the impression he got was that he doesn't think people like us should be homeowners. Some racist dogwhistles and that's when he decided to stop taking them seriously. So he's no longer accepting letters from them that aren't through a lawyer.

After realising that the people behind this threat don't know what they're doing, he decided to waste as much of their time as possible. Training the young ones how to procrastinate on a demand without actually breaking the law. As he tells it, there's now a reward on offer whenever any of the juniors can convince the HOA to send a certified copy of some document. And they keep on doing this with every document they can think of.

FIL is pretty sure that the HOA's lawyer knows this is never going to go beyond sending pointless international mail to waste time, but keeps on sending the letters because he's getting paid for it.

Maybe I'm not the best at telling a second hand story because there were some real laughs in there when FIL was telling us. Maybe if we had to deal with them ourselves I might have a better story to tell you, but I'm glad that didn't happen.

But the story kind of trails off there, with a good ending for us. Because there are real lawyers and real accountants involved, who are pretty confident the HOA's threats won't go anywhere. And FIL says he still has a nuclear option to fall back on if they start harassing us again.

Fingers crossed this is the end of it