(But It’s Easier If You’re Dead)
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it by not dying.
—WOODY ALLEN
Death is not a fun topic for anyone, particularly for the deceased, which is precisely why this chapter begins with a line attributed to Woody Allen. The reason I’ve spread some humor throughout this chapter is simple: It’s a morbid subject. If you are reading this section to get your bearings in the management of a loved one’s estate, I hope you won’t mistake any drollery or wordplay for disrespect. That said, the best eulogies make us laugh as much as they make us cry, but the various strains of identity theft (and scams) that can occur postmortem don’t naturally make for stand-up comedy material.
At this point in our journey through the hell of identity theft, my guess is that you’ve had it with me pointing out that it is the third certainty in life. (It’s right behind death and taxes, in case you just felt like diving into this chapter before reading the others and are thus hearing this for the first time.) And of course you’d be dead right if you felt that way. But this chapter is about the rare instance where you can experience all three certainties at once—the tax-related identity theft of a dead person.
There are a great many crimes that can be committed using different elements of someone’s personally identifiable information after they die. Death is a game-ender when it comes to most types of criminal activity (it’s hard to rob a bank or murder someone if you’re six feet under). And for all practical purposes, death is a release from all contracts. But, as you will see later in this chapter, some of those contractual obligations, and certain kinds of crimes, have a tendency to linger a bit longer than they should.
From 2006 through 2011, some 67,000 federal tax returns were filed where the names on the earnings reports didn’t match the names associated with the Social Security numbers. They were worth $3.1 million.
While it might have been a bunch of bum guesses—since fraudsters do occasionally roll the dice with made-up SSNs—it is more likely that these criminals knew for a fact that those numbers hadn’t been recorded on the Death Master File.
According to a 2015 report on CNN, employers made more than 4,000 E-Verify inquiries from 2008 to 2011 using nearly 3,900 SSNs belonging to people born before June 16, 1901.
Because the kind of crimes we’re talking about take advantage of the lag time between death and the closing of an estate, the first and perhaps most important point I can make here is that you should factor the eventuality of postmortem identity theft into your estate planning. The crimes aren’t committed against the decedent, per se, because not only is filing a complaint no longer an option for a deceased person, but he or she is technically no longer there to violate in the first place.
However, that’s not the case in the eyes of the law. As far as the state, the federal government, and all the places where the decedent did business are concerned, he or she is still alive until the organizations concerned are officially notified that the deceased, who had been previously paying income tax, will now be paying an inheritance tax, having been transmogrified into an entity that most certainly can get got: namely, the decedent’s estate.
When an estate gets hit, it definitely has a very negative effect on the survivors of the dearly departed. The mourning process is interrupted. Often, no one in the family has been invested with power of attorney, which means that financial crimes against the estate can’t be stopped right away, much less sorted out. This is why it’s so important to include postmortem identity theft precautions in your estate planning, which would include granting power of attorney to a trusted family member, one that the other beneficiaries know about, and making sure you have all postmortem communications ready (there are sample letters in Appendix 5), so that all your family needs to do is get the requisite copies of your official death certificate and distribute them in a timely fashion. Additionally, you can obviate a number of issues by doing something as simple as signing up for an identity theft protection program that includes identity management services as well as credit monitoring. Simple precautions can mean the difference between a relatively easy probate process and a big financial loss to further compound your emotional one.
With a wide gamut of opportunities, ranging from pillaging the decedent’s credit to co-opting his or her identity (so that the dead figuratively—i.e., financially—walk again, at least in name and Social Security number), it is important that family members and their lawyers acquaint themselves with the threats out there. When it comes to identity theft, forewarned is forearmed.
Remember, you’re going to get got. It might be happening as you read this sentence. If that’s the case, it’s something you will discover soon enough, because you are practicing the Three Ms and the fraud will turn up during your monitoring process while it’s still a pending charge or a hard inquiry at one of the three credit reporting agencies. After you pass away, however, unless appropriate measures are taken, no one will be checking. You can set up transaction alerts on your credit cards—even order a credit freeze—but it doesn’t matter. Your turn to get got might not come till you’re pushing up daisies. In fact, one of the greatest times of vulnerability is immediately after death, precisely because no one is paying attention to the credit and identity issues of the deceased.
Depending on the postdeath scenario and the kinds of information involved, this particular variety of identity shenanigan can be an annoyance, or it can be an unholy combination of Brewster’s Millions and Night of the Living Dead.
Here’s what you need to know: Any identity thief worth his or her salt can get through your defenses. In fact, it’s child’s play for them. Obviously, transaction notifications are worthless, because they only work if someone is receiving them. But even if a relative has been designated to monitor your phone, email, and social networking, it’s easy for an information-laden crook to turn the notifications off. The same thing goes for a credit freeze. The fact is, all your fraud precautions can be undone with a few phone calls, provided the caller has enough personally identifiable information.
Exercise Number One
It’s not something people tend to focus on very much. After all, why would anyone worry about the dead shopping for a loan? For the same reason, it may not occur to some folks that the decedent’s credit cards, birth certificate, Social Security number, old tax documents, and the far-flung constellation of identifying information need to be collected and stored securely.
The reason you need to be so careful should be clear by now. The recently deceased continue to exist on paper, and this may well be the case for some time. Until the government has officially acknowledged your death and finished processing the paperwork, your most sensitive data is just “there,” like so much zombie purchasing power.
More so than monitoring services or strong passwords, we all rely on ourselves to take action to combat identity theft—and you can only take action while you’re still alive and kicking. And since very few of us know when that’s going to change, it is crucial to get these matters squared away ahead of time.
Your anti-postmortem identity theft program will mostly take the form of a to-do list, since nothing can be done till … well, after the fact.
There are many different scams out there, ranging from the misappropriation of Social Security payments to the more old-fashioned practice of ghosting, whereby a person of approximately the same age assumes the identity of the deceased. Ghosting is less common than it used to be, but it does still happen.
Exhibit A: Don Draper, the brilliant, mercurial central character of AMC’s hit show Mad Men. As Don’s colleague Harry Crane says, “Draper? Who knows anything about that guy? No one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know.”
Born Dick Whitman, the character we’ve come to know as Don Draper is the son of a young prostitute who dies in childbirth and an abusive alcoholic father who meets his maker compliments of a horse kick to the face when Draper/Whitman is ten.
From there, he is raised in a bordello, where … let’s just say, bad things happened. To make a long backstory shorter, he drops out of high school, enlists in the army, and is sent to Korea, where he serves under Lieutenant Donald Francis Draper, an engineer assigned to build a field hospital with only Private Whitman to help. There is an accident, and Lieutenant Draper is killed, burned beyond recognition. Dick Whitman trades dog tags with the fallen officer. When he awakes in a hospital, he has become Draper. With the exception of a few scrapes with people who knew him as Dick—always dramatic moments on the show—Don Draper né Dick Whitman is a textbook example of a ghost.
Like Draper, most of the time a ghost is trying to avoid something—whether that is the law or gangsters, bad debt, or a bad marriage—by morphing into the persona of another who has no issues and a similar date of birth. This is one of the few crimes chosen by criminals who are trying to turn over a new leaf. It was common in the 1970s among a small demographic, the formerly radical members of violent student protest groups who had committed crimes—mostly bombings where no one got hurt—but no longer identified with the ideology that made them outlaws. Sometimes the ghost wasn’t making an entirely clean break, something depicted well in Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep. During the Vietnam War era, draft dodgers fleeing to Canada or points elsewhere often adopted ghost identities that made it possible for them to live as citizens of whatever country they chose. And, of course, before the Jim Crow laws came to an end, light-skinned African Americans defined as Negro by the one-drop rule were very motivated to pass as Caucasian, and so ghosting became an option.
One peculiarity of this kind of identity theft is that it is easier to do for women, who often change their names when they get married. It’s also easier for women to explain away long stretches of unemployment, attributing them to staying home to raise a family, even when they are secretly caused by a period of being dead, before being resurrected as someone else.
In keeping with the proliferation of possible crimes, there is no dearth of criminals out there who make a living in this deathly niche. They scan news the way cat burglars case homes, looking for death notices in the local paper, reading obituaries, even attending information-rich funerals (eulogies tend to contain a lot of personal information). Make no mistake about it: These scoundrels of the sweet hereafter can get a whole lot of shopping in before the three credit reporting agencies are notified of a person’s demise. Doubtless, those same miscreants will almost certainly try to use your Social Security number to score a supersized tax refund (that is, if you’re lucky enough to pass away during tax-filing season).
Ghostbook? Social Media and Death
According to a recent study by psychiatrist Elaine Kasket (yes, that’s her real name), the ability to post photos and written testimonials to the deceased on social networking sites like Facebook can be important in helping friends deal with the loss. As long as those posts remain respectful, they could also help relatives better know the deceased and ease their process of mourning.
So far, the biggest actors in deciding these issues have been social networking sites themselves. Facebook allows family members to remove a deceased user’s profile entirely, or place it in “memorial state,” which removes status updates and restricts access to current friends, Time reports. Flickr continues preferences set by the user when he or she was alive, including barring anyone from seeing photos marked private.
Some of these policies make sense, but I foresee Solomonic problems. If a widow wants her dead husband’s Facebook profile taken down, but his daughter wants it to remain active, how does Facebook decide? If a person has both a personal and a professional Facebook profile, might different rules of access apply for each?
How will they get the information needed to commit fraud? Sometimes the perpetrator is a family member, so they already have access. But more often, family members are distracted or distraught. There are visitors who come and go, unchecked, and of course the numerous demands of making final arrangements and dealing with matters of the estate can be distracting.
If there was a long illness, unsupervised healthcare workers may have had the run of the deceased’s domicile—including unrestricted access to its owner’s most sensitive information. If the wake was at the deceased’s home, or people sat shiva there, still more vulnerabilities exist.
The opportunities for fraud abound. Funerals aren’t only an opportunity for an identity thief to collect information about the deceased; they also provide criminals with a precise time to break into the decedent’s home. But instead of grabbing the television or the silver (too easy to miss), they are there for an envelope containing a financial statement or a copy of a previous year’s tax return. If a bad guy gets lucky, there is doubtless even more granular information or tasty transactional tidbits to be found in some homes—like credit cards, explanation of benefits statements, and account login information. From there, the race is on to apply for as much credit and buy as many pricy things for resale as possible before the money spigot runs dry.
If you store sensitive information in your home—including tax returns, old financial statements, and identification documents—buy a safe.
And use it properly.
Seven percent of Americans don’t lock their doors at night. Can you imagine how many don’t lock safes inside their locked homes?
Why is this sort of crime possible?
Part of the problem lies with government agencies, which are famously slow to get the news of a person’s demise. A recent audit of the Social Security Administration conducted by the Office of the Inspector General found that there were approximately 6.5 million Social Security numbers belonging to people aged 112 or older whose death information wasn’t in the system. Of those numberholders, only thirteen people were still receiving payments. The rest of those Social Security numbers were associated with “numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased.” This uncertainty is an identity thief’s bread and butter.
The fact that such an astronomical number of deaths have gone unrecorded in Numident (the SSA’s numerical identification system), and thus are also missing in the Death Master File, leaves plenty of room for misconduct.
According to the audit report, the “SSA received 4,024 E-Verify inquiries using the SSNs of 3,873 numberholders born before June 16, 1901.”
The report included a story about a scammer who managed to open bank accounts using zombie Social Security numbers. Those SSNs belonged to people who would have to be undead to open an account—and then only during evening hours. The Social Security numbers in question were issued to people born in 1869 and 1893, but, according to the Social Security Administration, they were still alive and well.
But there is another culprit, and if you get up right now and take a look in the mirror you can wave to him or her. It’s you. We are all the ultimate guardians of our identity. For a complete DIY walk-through of steps you need to take and the documents required to close down a deceased person’s identity, or to prepare your own estate so that family members or an executor can easily do it—all courtesy of the Identity Theft Resource Center—go to Appendices 3 through 5 in the back of the book.
While it’s true that your liability is zero if you are a family member of a deceased person who becomes a victim of identity theft (the same goes for any legitimate debt of the dead, as long as there are no other names listed on the account in question), it’s still no easy thing to go through. This is why it’s important to be prepared. And it won’t be easy to react when the trouble starts, so you might as well do it now.