Hello All,
**This post will eventually be deleted.**
Sorry I have been gone for so long. I have had a rough week. Here is the quick recap.
My partner D was "unofficially" living with me. My lease was going to be up at the end of August, and we decided to put in an application to have him join the lease as well. Well, we turned in an application, and they came back saying that he has a criminal record of multiple assaults on females in North Carolina. He has never been to NC. The property managers wanted him out right away and said I could not renew my lease if I wanted to have him around.
They said that they got this information from TransUnion, and asked us to contact TransUnion. We did. Now, D never uses credit cards. He has no loans or debt. He uses cash for everything. He is also a bit worried about state interference in people's lives and does not have a phone contract - just pays cash for prepaid phone cards. So, essentially, he has no credit history - I have tried to talk to him about this, but he refuses to "build" a credit history. Anyhow, the person we talked with at TransUnion said he had so little credit history, that he could not verify us over the phone and we needed to send in documentation (ID and address proof), and they would send us a credit report. That would take a couple of weeks. He did not say that he saw any criminal activity on the report. I thought it was odd that a Credit Bureau would do criminal background checks, but apparently they have a service that property managers can use.
Anyhow, we could not get much done over the weekend because the places in NC that we needed to call were closed. For the last couple of days, we have been calling and being shunted around from department to department in search of proof that D did not engage in criminal activity in NC. This morning, we finally got through to someone helpful who has confirmed that there is another man with the same first and last names and birthdate as D, but a different middle name and a different SSN who has done multiple assaults and misdemeanors in NC. What a nightmarish coincidence!! She said she would mail something to us showing that D (his full name and SSN) does not have a criminal record in NC. That should reach us in about 2 weeks.
I called the apartment manager, and they are going to run a different background check on him - with his middle initial this time and see if they come up with something different. In the meantime, we also want to check into whether D's identity has been compromised because when we tried to get his credit report at AnnualCreditReport.com, they asked us some strange verification questions about mortgages and auto loans that D does not have and then denied us access because he did not have this information. I hope to goodness that this is not the case. However, we will deal with that after the apartment situation.
What does this mean financially? Well, since this whole thing is probably not going to be sorted out for the next 5 days, I am going to roll over into a month-to-month lease at the end of this month. That is $100 more in rent than a 12-month lease based rent. After that, depending on what the outcome is (I am hesitant to be completely optimistic), we either get to live here or will have to move out. Moving out will cost money, new deposits, new application fees, if this crap is not sorted out - more headache financially and otherwise. After we deal with the criminal background crap, we will look into his credit history - depending on what we find there, we will probably have to go into more expense to fix that stuff.
If someone has to have the same name and same date of birth as D, why could he not have been someone who keeps his nose out of crime? Thank goodness he has a different middle name and a different SSN. Can you imagine the crap we would have to go through if this guy in NC had actually stolen D's identity and was using D's SSN when he got into trouble. Thank goodness for small favors, I suppose!
I understand that the property managers don't want someone they suspect may have a criminal record on their property, but we have in the past few days been treated like garbage. My poor, gentle D who would never ever harm anyone, has been treated rudely, and like he was a monster! It was almost as though they had decided that he did it, and so they could treat him like crap. If we didn't want to get this over with, we would sue for slander. I don't know if it is actually possible to do that, but I really feel like I would want to - it might feel like catharsis for the way we've been treated over this incident. The funny thing is - they are so wonderfully nice and polite as long as they don't think you have a criminal record!
I am not going to be posting very often until this stuff is sorted out - I am continuing to read the blogs though. I just have been too depressed to write anything. The only reason I feel like I am able to write today is because we made some progress this morning. Thanks for listening!
Background History Crap
August 27th, 2013 at 07:40 pm
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