Internal Revenue Service: National tax collectors

Social Security Number: Initially used for identifying citizens for national welfare retirement and disability benefits, but now also used as a de facto national ID number

Your SSN, along with your full legal name, date of birth, and address are often the most basic requirements for accessing your information from the government as well as applying for bank accounts and credit/background checks. Landlords would have his info to perform credit/background checks, which is sketchy as hell because they retain those records and can use it for identity theft, like this landlord did

Given how desperate these landlords are getting, I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear worse stories of landlords applying for credit cards in tenants’ names and maxing them out

Personally, the better of landlords I had (they would probably not need gulag, just reappropriation of their surplus land) would have us make accounts on the credit/background check website and list their email as a recipient of the credit/background check, which at least is probably more secure than his file cabinet