Scam Country

Years ago I signed up for Credit Karma, which had a program that let you file taxes for free in the US. I did this for a few years until TurboTax - the company that lobbies congress to make the tax filing process complicated and thus facilitate it's own business bought Credit Karma. And as a result it's tax filing software was spun off onto...CashApp - a cash sending app. I was not going to file my taxes with fucking CashApp. I kept the Credit Karma account for unknown reasons - my credit never really changed and I pay my card off each month. 

That was until today. I get an email from Credit Karma saying that my credit score had dropped 12 points and asked if I had "Opened a new account" recently. This scared me so I signed in after like 4 years and looked at my report. Under my name was a new Chime card that was opened in November of last year. It didn't show a balance on it and as near as I could tell it was a debit account of some kind, but I didn't make it.

I called Chime to report a fraudulant account and I'm not sure if that'll actually do anything. Then I went back to Credit Karma to file a dispute against one of the credit rating companies to try and get it off my report.

Then I...made separate accounts with each credit reporting company to freeze my credit reports. This would in theorey prevent anyone from opening a line of credit under whatever they stole from me. I would not have known had I not kept that Credit Karma account and also didn't try to file my taxes for free.

So in order to do this you have to make 3 seperate accounts with the 3 credit reporting companies. Equifax (the company that leaked everyone's information in the first place and is the reason this is even happening), Experian, and TransUnion. At each stage of account creation all three companies try to upsell you on monthly credit monitoring subscriptions each with worthless features and dubious value. They all pretend that they can freeze your credit but you have to actually hunt for the "credit freeze" page. With Experian it was an unmarked hyperlink. With TransUnion you have to make a separate account to freeze your credit. If I have to have a credit check run at any point in the future, I'll have to log into each of these fucking websites, turn off the freeze, and then turn them back on after whatever check is done. I will have to do this for the rest of my life. 

That's how it is in this Scam Country - you have to be constantly vigilant that some fucking sudden scam doesn't befall you and you have to appeal to these fucking companies that hold you in their thrall. 

Here's a funny story: One year I file my taxes as normal and the next year I got a letter from the IRS that says I owe $5000 extra. It turns out that the company I worked for the year prior changed payroll companies, and so both companies sent out W2s to the IRS, so the IRS thought I made 2x as much but only paid half. I didn't know this until a year later, when they sent a letter saying I owed them money. It was eventually sorted out by getting a corrected W2 and the letter from the CEO mailed via certified mail, which had to be done in a 2 week period before the deadline otherwise I would start to be charged interest. 

When you file taxes in the US you don't actually know what you owe so you have to take an educated guess based off paperwork you get from your income sources, which you have to hang onto forever, and fill out correctly. The IRS already knows how much you made because employers send them this information. This is just an oppertunity for you to fuck up and get punished. Turbo Tax has recognized this and puts a price tag on the security of filing and maybe not getting punished. Every year when I file it's incredibly stressful because I don't know if I did everything right until it's "accepted". 

I didn't ask for any of this. You cannot opt out of credit reporting companies tracking you in the US and you can't opt out of them having your sensative info, which they then leak, and then you have to navigate their ad-filled websites to have some level of agency over this nightmare. You cannot opt out of the tax filing company getting bought out by a bigger company and selling the parts off for scrap. You cannot opt out of your sensative info getting stolen and used for something, which then ruins this arbitrary score, which then ruins your ability to get housing, money, maybe a job (yes, some jobs run credit check on you before you can work there). 

Every day in scam country is spent numbing yourself to the hypervigilance, navigating nightmare websites, and wishing you were fucking born in the EU where they maybe don't have this shit. If I could excercize a little bit of naivety here: I would like to live in a place where Credit Reporting companies aren't a thing, where the government tells you how much taxes you owe without having to file and risk getting it wrong, and where you can't get "fired" for nothing. You know, semi-solid ground underneath one's feet. This will never happen in America. You are living breathing surplus value and the system will squeeze all of it out until you are dead and in the ground. 

And I know it won't fix all my problems, but I hope to leave Scam Country one day. I want to lie in bed knowing I won't have to file taxes, freeze and unfreeze 3 credit report accounts, or live and die by a secret number.