I wired rent to my landlord who has a name that sounds Islamic. The government stole my money with no explanation. I can’t remember the name of the department, but BofA couldn’t tell me what was going on for days (whether because they were obfuscating the situation I’ll never know). Eventually, I learned what had happened. I printed a PDF and mailed in a form requesting my money back. The government wrote back that they had no record of the case number that I put on the form. They could have made me homeless in the process and I just gave up fighting the bureaucracy on the assumption that I’d have to invest more time, effort, and frustration than one-month’s-rent was worth.
Both BofA and the US government failed me hard. That’s when I truly appreciated how easily I could be crushed by the state.