1. The scamster probably knew the timing of the county sending out assessments.
2. If Orange County does like Santa Clara County, the notice of what the payments will be comes out in the summer, but the first one-half payment is due in December, and the second half in April. Unless Randomthought's hubby is losing contact with reality he should have known the timing for a payment demand was off.
3. Two big clues it was a scamster: as Randomthought posted, government agencies don't make phone calls to demand $$$; scamsters always try to create a false sense of urgency/crisis to bypass targets' logical thinking processes.
I know timeshares are seldom a good investment. I did not know that they are or can be a taxable form of real property. For us, timeshares and HOAs are Oh, HELL no's!