What is “ghosting,” and why does it start the week of the funeral?
Identity theft after death, which New York’s consumer-protection office calls “ghosting,” is the use of a dead person’s name, birth date, and Social Security number to open credit, take out loans, or claim a tax refund. It starts with the obituary. For weeks afterward, that credit file often goes unwatched, and the people who do this know it.
The bureaus learn of a death from Social Security, but Experian’s guidance admits “it can take some time for that notification to happen.” That gap is the business model, and the second scam in its purest form: the obituary is the victim list, published by the family.
First, keep perspective
By law “family members usually don’t have to pay the debts of a deceased relative from their own money,” as the Federal Trade Commission puts it; the cost is usually time and paperwork, not money. And almost every step below is a letter or a phone call you were going to make anyway.
Then there is the feeling, which deserves naming. The week after a death, this list reads like a betrayal of grief, as if the right response to loss were a trip to the post office. It is not. Protecting someone’s name after they die is one of the last things you get to do for them, and a checklist exists so that one person, in the worst week, does not have to think, only to do.
The checklist
Before the obituary runs
- Give the funeral director the Social Security number, and confirm the death was reported. Funeral homes routinely report to Social Security; if you cannot confirm it, call 1-800-772-1213. Social Security takes death reports only by phone or in person, so anything offering to take the report online is not Social Security.
- Order at least ten certified copies of the death certificate, with and without cause of death; every bank, insurer, bureau, and agency will want one, many by mail.
- Write the obituary to orient the people who mourn rather than to catalog the family. That line is from The Recoverable Family; New York’s guidance supplies the specifics: no date of birth, street address, maiden names, or family members’ full names. Weigh printing the time and place of the service, which New York warns can point thieves to an empty home, and ask a neighbor to be at the house during it.
The first calls
- Notify one credit bureau in writing and ask for a “deceased alert.” All three bureaus say the one you notify tells the other two. Enclose a certified death certificate (never the original), your own ID, and, unless you are the spouse, the court papers naming you. A lender who pulls the file sees the alert and can stop the application; Experian notes you can also request a credit freeze on the file. Then request the credit report from each bureau separately; unlike the alert, it needs its own letter.
- Notify every bank, card issuer, insurer, and lender in writing, certified mail with return receipt, a certified copy enclosed. Ask them to close individual accounts and remove the name from joint ones. Include every pension and annuity payer, so the deposits stop; money that keeps arriving after a death is owed back.
- Cancel the identity documents: the driver’s license at the motor-vehicle office, the passport (returned to the State Department), and the voter registration. USA.gov’s Report a death to government agencies is the master list.
The paper trail
- Tell the IRS who speaks for the estate. File Form 56, the notice that you are the estate’s fiduciary. With it or letters testamentary, plus the death certificate, you can request the deceased’s tax transcripts: what has been filed under that number.
- Keep reading the mail, especially from Medicare. In September 2026 the agency that runs Medicare barred eleven medical-equipment suppliers, every one of them billing for people already dead. Report a statement showing equipment delivered after the death as fraud, to Medicare, not to the supplier’s number.
- Treat everything that arrives because of the obituary as unverified. The book’s rule: an invoice, a claim, an urgent request, anything that arrives because of it, goes through the executor and the documented plan rather than being answered directly. Prepaid-arrangement documentation lives in the Secure Guide and, in the book’s words, “is exactly what lets the family recognize a claim that does not match.” That includes the “old friend” needing account access and the “platform notice” demanding a password, now generated automatically from obituary details. Use the platforms’ own legacy and memorialization tools, reached from the platform, never from the message.
The watch
- One person holds the information and re-checks the file. That is New York’s guidance: centralize the deceased’s personal information and share it only as needed. Pull the credit report again at three months and before the estate closes; the deceased alert is a flag, not a lock. If something appears, file a police report in the deceased’s jurisdiction, notify all three bureaus, and report it to the FTC.
If you are reading this before you need it, print it and put it in the Family Guide beside the continuity contact list, so the person who opens that binder in the worst week finds the list already made.
Quick reference
- Social Security: the funeral director reports it; confirm, or call 1-800-772-1213. Phone or in person only.
- Death certificates: ten certified copies, with and without cause of death.
- Obituary: where identity theft after death starts; no birth date, address, maiden names, or family members’ full names; weigh the service time and place.
- Credit bureaus: one letter for the deceased alert, one to each for the report; pull it again at three months.
- Banks, insurers, lenders, pension payers: certified mail, return receipt, certified copy enclosed.
- Government: license, passport, voter registration; IRS Form 56, then transcripts.
- Everything that arrives: through the executor and the plan, never from the message; Medicare statements go to Medicare, not the supplier.
The takeaway
Nobody becomes interested in deceased alerts. People become interested in protecting the person they just lost, and in sparing the family the second blow of a stranger spending that name. This site has argued that estate planning should come last, after the living work of System, At-Home, and Financial, because everything before it is about life. That order stands; the executor’s week is the one that begins at Estate — ten letters, a few phone calls, and a short obituary, so that the name you are mourning stays theirs.
Not sure where your family stands? The free Recoverability Self-Assessment takes about ten minutes and tells you which Area to start with.