No Rest from Identity Thieves—Even After Death

Did you know that identity theft is prevalent even among those who have already passed away? It’s true.

Records of the dead are especially ripe picking for identity thieves, because in most cases, there is nobody alive or paying attention to press charges…until the issue comes to the estate.

To protect your loved ones even after you’re gone, make sure to specify in your last wishes documents that they are to notify the Social Security office straight away, and send documented proof of your demise (death certificates and letters of administration proving estate representation are required). Your next move should be make sure your executor notifies the big three credit reporting agencies with a letter of request to close down your credit record, and a notation made on the record of the death, and that documented proof has been received by the agency (again, the death certificate and proof of estate representation). Also request documented proof that this has been done for the estate by asking that copies be mailed to the executor for his/her files.

A suggestion for the living: have a credit freeze put on your records to protect them from access by anyone else extending or opening new lines of credit without your consent. A freeze gets the merchant to contact you (or attempt to) and verify that it is indeed YOU who are requesting additional credit. With this method, absolutely nobody can extend or obtain new credit unless the freeze is lifted—and that must be done by you.

Identity thieves make their living (or their livelihood) stealing credit information from others through various means—trash cans, dumpsters, mail hijacking, stealing wallets and purses, information from obituaries and genealogy websites, and computer hacking. We aren’t safe from these loathsome creatures even after we die—and that’s the precise time we should be at our most armored against them.

When cleaning out a house in preparation for an estate sale, lots of old, outdated documents get tossed in the trash, and this is the perfect fodder for these sorts of thieves. Any document with an account number, a Social Security number, an address, or even a photo is ripe pickings for these criminals to do their dirty work. Normally, nobody would even think of reporting a death to a credit bureau, and these thieves know it. Sometimes the Social Security office doesn’t even get notified in a timely manner, leaving the door wide open for all kinds of mischief to occur—and the estate winds up paying the bills if it isn’t caught in time!

Here’s how to protect the dead, and the living, from even more grief in this time of terrible loss:

1. Contact the Social Security office and verbally notify the clerk of the death and ask what documentation they will need to close out the account.

2. Contact the big three credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) and report the death. Ask what specific documentation is needed to close out and notate the credit record.

3. Make sure ALL policies, statements, membership cards (especially those Social Security cards), and bills of any kind are shredded WITH THE EXEPTION OF THOSE THAT WILL BE NEEDED FOR THE FINAL TAX RETURN (anything from that current year). To ensure the most difficulty in obtaining information from your trash, time your document disposal with the trash route—put them out with the trash on the day of pick-up, or put them in the can AFTER the pickup has already occurred. If you keep the trash secured from public access until the next pickup, then your estate documents will be at the BOTTOM of your trash can, making it extremely messy and tedious for a casual picker to get to without some very obvious effort—in which case, he’s likely to be noticed and the police called.

4. Obtain closeout statements from any and all companies the deceased had business dealings with in the year leading up to death. You need to make double-sure there are no outstanding debts of any kind, leaving loopholes for identity thieves. You never know where these thieves come from—some are from inside corporations, and can access customer files easily. AOL just recently had an employee sell the membership list to outside firms, and heaven only knows what personal information was on that list. CitiBank also lost customer data somewhere in the bowels of UPS, and other companies have suffered hacker break-ins, cyber-stealing precious customer data. You simply cannot be too careful nowadays!

5. No matter how famous, infamous, or illustrious the deceased may have been, do not give away potentially harmful information in his/her obituary notice or on a genealogy website—keep it brief and to the point without extraneous contents that could open up cracks for someone else to gain access to their former life. People of all sorts wait in the woodwork to assume identities for all sorts of reasons.

Not only will this protect the deceased from privacy assault, it will protect the surviving family and friends from assault on the estate, which can be ongoing and takes a very long time to clear up (even for the living).

A will, a health care directive, and a power of attorney aren’t enough to protect you in your final days any more. Instructing your executor and/or beneficiaries how to protect you further will ensure you and your loved ones get the peace we all deserve.