The text leans heavily ChatGPT.

I suspect this is a revenge fantasy rather than something that actually happened.

As for who's responsible - it's a mix. Some people who deal with these situations are doing their jobs because they have no choice.

Some are active sadists and do the job because they get to bully the weak.

This happens a lot in benefits management, and also in immigration, in most countries.

possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.

I'm not so naive as to think there's no podunk, crossroads "town" out there that has some mayberry-ass fax machine just spitting out whatever you send it. But given how attractive government offices are to people for either pranking or ...ahem redressing via their fax machines since the late 70's, it's more common than you might believe for even the smallest little townships to have a contract with a company that turns faxes into emails.