Modern-day Grave Robbing

In today’s world, even the dead can’t escape fraudsters.

By Bobby Alger, Marketing –

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) was founded in 1978 in response to the Watergate scandal as a means of ensuring integrity and accountability in the Executive Branch. The OIG’s website states that the Inspector General “protect[s] the public against fraud, waste, and abuse.” Thus, in 2014, when the OIG discovered that more than $380,000 had been paid to an already-deceased person, they promptly investigated.

A Utah woman had been collecting Social Security retirement benefits intended for her deceased aunt for more than twenty years. According to the OIG, the Social Security Administration (SSA) had no record of her aunt’s death, so the SSA kept paying.

This type of fraud is so common that it has its own name: deceased payee fraud. The OGI’s 2012 report estimates that the SSA paid around $100 million to deceased beneficiaries. To put it in context, those 100 million dollars could be used to pay for the education of over 8 thousand students or provide accessible transit to the citizens of Phoenix, AZ. The US Government currently runs on a budget deficit runs on a budget deficit and needs every penny it can save.

How can identity fraud be prevented?

Documents and identities can be forged and stolen, but a new technology from Converus called IdentityDetect® can help detect falsified records or fraudulent identities. The technology combines science-backed methodologies with state-of-the-art technology to verify the truthfulness of subjects.

IdentityDetect measures the increase of cognitive load that accompanies lying. When a test subject is deceptive, the eye-tracking software alerts the user to that deceptive behavior, giving a “deception score” almost instantaneously. Imagine the time and money that could be saved by eliminating identity fraud.

Photo by / Waldemar Brandt