Submitted 1 year ago by OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world to [deleted]
In my limited understanding, deaths aren’t tracked the same way that births generally are. After birth, you receive a social security number in the United States. This is a federal identification. When you die, that notification may not extend past a local level, leaving the social security number valid.
This is all second hand info though, so take it with a grain of salt.
The type of identity theft where you live as another person isn’t common in the modern age where births and deaths are absolutely tracked accurately.
Modern identity theft is using someone’s personal information to get a credit card in their name or access to their bank account. You call up customer support and say “I’m John Smith and I need my account reset” and when they say “please prove your John Smith” you often times only need date of birth, address, phone number, email, mother’s maiden name, or something else literally anyone could find out about you. If there’s something they don’t know they can sometimes convince customer service by getting angry and yelling until the minimum wage worker decides to give the scammer access.
When people talk about online privacy, they often mean this. I’ll admit that as a kid I used to gain access to people’s emails just by looking at the stuff they posted on their public Facebook page. The answer to their password reset security question was almost always there. I never went further than that, but once you have access to one thing, you can usually get access to other things.
All it takes is one forged document, given to the right entity, to get a legal ID with the forged info, which can then be used to open more accounts. Or perhaps someone on the inside helps out by conveniently deciding to not look closely at the documents.
And if you are in the situation when you stumble on a legal birth certificate from someone who is deceased, then technically the document isn’t even forged. Someone would have to take the extra step to look through death records to find out the scam. This can be particularly difficult if the person takes the certificate to a new state entirely, the authorities there may not know who to contact and as long as the certificate has the proper seals, they will just accept it.
Identity theft is a fraud which isn’t impersonating the dead but the living. Like you found someone ID (or even just a copy), and started to open credit-cards using these idea. Some online credit companies aren’t checking deeply someone identity. So with a stolen ID you get a credit card with some money, but the credit is at someone’s else name. 6 month later, that other persons start to get letter regarding an unpaid debts. In the end, it’s relatively easy to demonstrate that the credit company was at fault for not checking everything properly, but as the victim you’ll have a lot of stress and legal fees.
This reminds me of Office Space when they ask the door to door salesman how to launder money.
This is the only reply I like.
Multiple disjointed government databases and people not checking each one carefully is how it starts. Once you have an existing account in some one’s name, probably even less checks are done allowing you to exploit the system further. Meanwhile, relatives of the deceased are probably not too concerned about contuining to monitor their credit scores… etc
KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s not what identity theft is.
That term is used for impersonating someone else, but generally only for a time and usually online, not in person.
For example, someone gets access to your unlocked phone and uses that to insult your boss on social media in your name, order stuff with your banking details, or sign up for credit cards.