Describe:

Main questions:
1. How can someone steal a dead person’s identity?
2. What do car insurance companies have in place to prevent identity theft

Examine:

Articulate Learning

https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/blog/2018/11/why-do-insurance-companies-check-your-
driving-licence.html
- Car insurance insurers check to ensure you have all the documentation needed
- This information is usually gathered by asking a few quick questions prior to
issuing a quote, such as the type of car you’ll be insuring and how many miles
you drive per year. However, some providers go the extra step and carry out a
driving licence check with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)
- Things on the DVLA:
- Your entitlement to drive
- Penalty points and convictions
- Past disqualifications
- The type of licence held
- The length of time the licence has been held for.
- Yet the insurer needs confirmation from the driver before doing these checks - some
people may say they don’t want them to look into it.
- https://www.viewdrivingrecord.service.gov.uk/driving-record/licence-number
- This site allows people to put in their license number, their national insurance
number and postal code
- This allows for a free secure online facility to enable you to view some of the
information held on your driving licence to
- Apparently they make checks to verify your identity though

https://www.viewdrivingrecord.service.gov.uk/verify/start
- You can also then verify your identity through a valid UK passport or a photocard driving
licence issued in England, Wales or Scotland
- access to information about your bank account or credit cards
- A mobile phone or tablet computer
- You get to choose which companies verifies your identity - can bounce around and test
the waters to see who is the least likely to do a lot of digging.
- You can apply to update, replace or renew your driving licence online at
www.gov.uk/browse/driving

Copes, Heith and Lynne Vieraitis. 2007. “Identity Theft: Assessing Offenders’ Strategies and
Perceptions of Risk.”ICPSR Data Holdings 1–87.
- The most common methods of acquiring information were to buy it from others, steal it
from mailboxes or trash cans, or to obtain it from people they knew
- Found several people incarcerated for identity theft worked at state Department of Motor
Vehicle offices and facilitated the purchasing of illegitimate identification
- Information was purchased from employees of banks, credit agencies, a state law
enforcement agency, mortgage companies, state Department of Motor Vehicles,
hospitals, doctor’s offices, a university, car dealerships and furniture stores.
- Gladys, “It’s so easy to get information and everybody has a price.”
 - Identity thieves are equally likely to come from working-class or middle-class
backgrounds
- Approximately one-third of them used their employment to carry out their crimes.
- The most common way identity thieves account for their crimes is by denying that
they caused any real harm to actual individuals.
- Buying Information—the most common method of obtaining a victim’s
information was to buy it from employees of various businesses and state
agencies or from acquaintances on the streets.
- Mailboxes and Trash cans—many offenders stole mail from residential
mailboxes and small businesses such as insurance companies
- They have a variety of skills that allow for them to do the crime: good social skills,
intuitive, technical, and have system knowledge.
- Key recommendations:
- Control access to business and residential mailboxes and dumpsters.
- Monitor how documents are disposed of
- Limit the number of employees with access to sensitive information
- Conduct careful background checks of employees.
- Require passwords to withdraw money, even when people withdraw in person
- Banks should also be more aware of who enters the bank and watch for
behaviors not people.
- All stores need to be consistent in checking identification.
- Also advertise the potential legal consequences of identity theft.
- Five offenders used family members’ information without their knowledge and in one
case the information was on family members who were deceased.
- People do whatever they can get save some money here or there

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/210459.pdf
- Most issuers of drivers’ licenses have a system that requires the showing of additional
documents of identification, although these vary considerably in stringency
- The California Department of Motor Vehicles issues more than 100,000 fraudulent
driver's licenses annually to criminals who use them to steal the identities of
unsuspecting victims, according to internal DMV documents and interviews with agency
fraud investigators

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/driver-and-vehicle-licensing-agency/about/
recruitment
- 5 days of learning a year
- online learning through Civil Service Learning
- classroom training courses
- mentoring and coaching networks
- use of our own Open Resource Centre (library)

Antonia:
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/11/dead-peoples-social-security-numbers-still-in-use.html
- Article talks about how numerous people in the system are people who are deceased
- Scammers will take identity of people who were born in a year similar to their own (this
can include many different identities rather than just one or two)
- “During tax years 2006 to 2011, 66,920 people filed using a Social Security number for someone
born before June 16, 1901” in the same sense; not enough attention is paid to fake use of sin
numbers
 - “Without a date of death properly noted in the database, government agencies and other entities
inquiring wouldn’t necessarily know an individual was deceased”
- Builds on the importance of having to note that an individual is deceased; otherwise
account will remain open and can easily be stolen by someone else

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsMg5RVNTG4
- Youtube video but it displays how someone was able to take an identity and assume the identity
- Case of ‘John Darwin’ who assumed identity of John Jones
- Showed he looked for someone who had a similar birth year and someone who had a
similar name to his (for when he assumed a new identity after faking his death)
- Process of stealing the identity included; Darwin looked through the death column of a local
newspaper and then went to register office and stole personal details of ‘John Jones’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCYk3FZfKcs
- Talks about how obituaries place victims at a high risk
- All that is needed; first and last name; date of death → can go online (for $10) and find
the social security numbers that are attached to that person’s name
- If person died recently; takes financial companies 60 days to catch up to government
records and in that time period people take deceased person’s identity to open new
accounts
- Mentions how families of the deceased who are grieving do not think to close all government or
financial accounts immediately; giving information at funeral homes can help prevent possible
victimization
- Sometimes identity theft can extend to other family members listed in the obituary
- How does this relate?

Supreet:
https://www.utica.edu/academic/institutes/cimip/idcrimes/schemes.cfm
- This article looks at the different ways in which people steal identities
- Dumpster diving - going through someone’s garbage
- Mail theft - stealing mail from one’s mailbox
- Social engineering - deceiving someone to give sensitive information
- Shoulder surfing - looking over one’s shoulders
- Stealing personal items - this may include wallets, documents, etc.
- Pretexting - doing prior research on one’s personal information and getting more
information from them (people tend to give it no questions asked because they
believe they are legit since they have their personal information from before)
- Phishing - tricking people into giving personal information (this can include online
and standard mail)
- Pharming - creating a website that looks legitimate to get personal information

Reyns, Bradford W., and Billy Henson. 2016. "The Thief with a Thousand Faces and the
Victim with None." International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology
60(10):1119-1139.
- This article also looks at how people tend to steal identities (emphasis on online
victimization)
- One’s online routine activity impacts their likelihood of becoming a victim
 - Online banking and purchasing can increase risk of victimization - this is
because it involves disclosing personal information and thus, thieves may
hack of phish
- Having one’s personal information posted online (by a family member or
someone known to them) can also increase risk of victimization - thieves
can then find this information and use it

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/fraudsters-need-just-three-details-steal-
identity-and-can-found/
- This article looks at the 3 easy steps for a criminal to gain access to your accounts
- Once they have your name and date of birth, it is not difficult for them to figure
out where you live - online directories usually contain such information
- Ultimately, criminals use this information and create fake identification
documents - there are sites available that allows people to create fake passports
(usually these look no different from the original ones)

- Took the information from the obituary

Solutions
● Awareness, knowledge
● More Security measures - for employees who may have access to sensitive information
● Template for obituaries - no stating date of death
● Solution can be just sending forms to one more organization
- Instead of having the family doing it, they get the funeral home to send it to all the
organizations for them which would reduce the 60 day period, diminishing the
time criminals have to steal people identity
● Centralize information
● Problem could be that people aren't reporting it? People aren’t reading their mail?
● Funeral homes having separate department to deal with closing people’s accounts or
dealing with the family to do it - starts the process earlier
○ Direct numbers from funeral home
○ Also from car insurance companies

In final report:
- Summarize case
- Provide explanations: ghost broking or ghosting
- Laws that cover identity theft
- Explain procedural training for employees

Feedback:
 - Do not speculate
- Know it happened and that it could happen
- Given the ways it could happen, what solution can address them
- Thousand of ways to get it, but how to act on it
- Collect information: call funeral home (social engineering)
- What paperwork does a funeral home have to fill out, who do they send it to
- Database idea
- Awareness issue
- Is the information centralized?
- Requirement for closing accounts and how long does it take to get to financial places
- If takes 60 days, why is this
- Look at past cases
- Deterrence doesn’t work - certainty - of being caught, severity (punishment - sightly
worse of the benefits you get) and celerity (swiftness - sent to court right away)
- Law and legislation is more difficult to do
- Nothing over the phone, everything in person
- Main problems:
- Individual level - too much information given, not closing accounts - wouldn’t
have received mail if the account was closed
- 60 day period issue - still ample amount of time for the people to steal the identity
- Too multivalent to stop it completely
- Overarching problem: Ghosting
- Corporate level issue: insurance
- Individual: awareness
- Recommendations:
- Funeral home takes one extra step to fill out the paperwork
- Give a list of places you have an account with and send them a file of the
death certificate as a faster process than master death file
- Database to send out all information

Scott funeral home: