Videos posted by content creator @psmillan__ on Instagram and TikTok went viral on X, getting roasted for doling out credit score repair advice and strategies for getting tens of thousands of dollars worth of investments from banks that users worried were dubious at best.
Now, users online are tagging the banks she references to try and report her.
In one video, reposted to X by the account @TikTokInvestors, which curates “cringy finance content,” @psmillan__ explains “How To Get High Credit Limits.”
The woman explains how you can boost your credit score by billing yourself across a couple of different LLCs.
The way it works, she explains, is that you make an invoice billing yourself from one LLC, pay the invoice to another with your credit card, then just pay off the credit card bill from your checking account… with the money just sent there by your credit card.
“Once I pay off the credit card, I will do this a couple of times, and I will then call my bank and ask them for a credit limit increase, cuz my limits are too low,” the TikToker explains.
“YOU ARE ALSO MAXING IT OUT AND PAYING IT OFF,” a caption with a diamond emoji reads on the screen during this description.
“A bonus is that [the accounting software] QuickBooks will also give you funding because it looks like you’re making sales on their platform,” she added.
The video quickly attracted backlash on X, with users questioning the legality of the maneuver, and the video being hit with a Community Note claiming that the method the woman was using in the video was of questionable legality, pointing to an Indian legal blog about so-called “Circular transactions.”
The Daily Dot couldn’t confirm if the user was violating any specific law, but users on X shared their own concerns about the efforts.
"The IRS should be on TikTok more," said one user.
"She gonna be the next Netflix documentary," said another.
The video of her advice on Twitter has racked up over 24 million views, with the vast majority of respondents recommend not taking it.
But if you were looking for more advice, her Instagram account has links to a series of video courses for sale for $25 on “bank plays” and financial literacy, with one course promising to help secure $70,000 in funding from a single bank.
She told the Daily Dot that the viral video wasn’t meant to help build credit scores and wasn’t something she actually taught in her courses.
“They made up what they wanted to believe so they can get people to follow along, meanwhile they don’t even know what I teach because they never took my class,” she explained, saying the videos were shared without her consent.
On Monday she posted another video on her own X account showing how one of her students leveraged credit cards to get funding to buy an Airbnb, and pushed back on people questioning her methods.
“First BANKS don’t ask for proof of income on a credit card. Ask your banker. Its 0% APR for 12 months and she spent $10K on this SPECIFIC investment! Not $150k on this property. She got approved for $150k but only used $10k,” she posted, clarifying that her student was renting the property, not buying it.
“It will take her 6 months to pay off the debt and then she will profit! You can do the same. With no income but good credit,” Millan said in follow-up tweets. “This Airbnb is projected to make $2k/ month profit to pay off her $10k debt. The other $140k she can use to put down on more airbnbs; real estate OR her own business”
Those tweets led some people to post tweets reporting her to a series of banks, including Navy Federal Credit Union and Bank of America.
"Thank you for letting us know! I'll pass this along to the appropriate teams for review," replied Navy Federal.
When one poster claimed that Millan’s strategy might be a violation of rules on circular transactions—citing laws which close loopholes on tax shelters—Millan said those laws wouldn’t apply to what she’s doing.
“First I don’t do that, people assumed that. It says clearly on there if it’s a real article to avoid paying taxes. I pay my taxes 😊,” Millan posted.
Despite claiming that the advice didn't break any law, plenty of users reacted in horror to the advice, which encourages people to take on high amounts of debt on credit cards which often charge huge interest rates after the introductory period ends
“good God how many people like this are you going to get into bankruptcy with insane interest payments,” reacted @SocDoneLeft.
On Instagram, she also pushed back on the idea that there was anything wrong with what she was doing, posting a series of stories of people promoting her businesses despite the criticism that was coming from “going viral.”
"While my girl going viral and got y'all SHOOK, please understand we got REAL RESULTS," said one post she shared.
One video on TikTok account claims that she’s 26 years old and is making over $30,000 a month from her businesses, which appear to be a few Airbnbs and a pink event space.
“I was able to get those locations with credit,” she says in one video.”When I first started, I was able to get funding from the banks, because I had no money y’all.”
After college, she said, she started getting business credit cards where she didn’t have to show proof of income to get approved.
“I’ve been doing this for four, almost five years now,” she said.
“With the Airbnb business, or with the event space business as well, or even the real estate business, I don’t do nothing in that business … because I have people in place who do all the work for me and I just get paid out monthly … and I’m basically just living,” she explained. “You could do the very same thing, it’s very much not hard."
But the internet seems to disagree.
Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.
The post ‘The IRS should be on TikTok more’: The internet is trying to narc on this TikToker dubious scheme to raise your credit score appeared first on The Daily Dot.
from Tech https://ift.tt/VGpsODH
0 Comments