7 ms·

What to do if the bank says you're dead

82 points by catacombs 6y ago

mmastrac 6y ago
This reminds me of an old (apocryphal?) story about someone who ended up mailing back a bunch of misaddressed email with "DECEASED" on it and causing major issues for someone. I cannot remember where I read this first.
- hyperman1 6y ago
  After buying our house, we kept getting important official mail from some governemental org, concerning not the previous owner, but some completely different guy, we dont even know who. We always sent it back noting wrong address, and they kept sending it right back to us. We started to get 4 or 5 of these letters each week. One day I got sick of it and wrote 'Has been swallowed alive by crocodile' on one of these. Someone took notice, presumably, as the mail stopped.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
My somewhat spotty knowledge of law in an alternate universe spun from merging film noir and the Marx brothers tells me that a dead man can't be convicted of bank robbery.
- Verdex 6y ago
  It's something that sounds like a great twist in a drama. The bad guy looks on in horror as he realizes that the people who he's been maliciously declaring dead so that he can steal from them are also immune from legal consequences from taking revenge. Of course in real life I bet they "realize" you're alive all of a sudden. Which does make me wonder if that's not a legitimate way to "come back to life". Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Or are they going to do the leg work to declare you alive? Or for that matter, maybe you can just turn yourself into the IRS for evading taxes. Would that make things better or worse?
  - msla 6y ago
    I think you're assuming the system has more consistency than it does. That is, there's no inherent reason the system must have a consistent view of you as alive or dead, so the reasonable conclusion is that it won't, so you'll be alive to the parts of it responsible for punishing you, but dead to the parts of it you want to be alive to. After all, the jail won't burn down because it's holding a person some government database considers to be dead.
    - Verdex 6y ago
      Yeah, this is a good point. However, I'm wondering if you can't bring things into alignment. Like, if the IRS wants to get money from you, then all of your financial parts of you need to be considered alive. And maybe that's good enough. Or maybe you could commit libel or slander or copyright infringement such that people will want to sue you for damages, but you're not legally able to lose money because you can't legally hold money. And from that perspective ... maybe people could pay you to commit slander or copy right infringement and then you can live off of that money until someone shows up who is willing to do the leg work to bring you financially back from the dead so that they can successfully sue you for damages. Really this is more of a thought experiment though. Like, obviously the government could bring you back if they really wanted to. It's just that they don't really want to because it's too much work for somebody. And it's sad that there probably does exist a crime/civil violation that you could commit such that suddenly it's worth someone's effort to bring you back.
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        This train of thought reminds me of the plot of The Unincorporated Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Maybe they do like the movie Brazil when Jill was legally dead.
- protomyth 6y ago
  Prosecutors are remarkably capable of cutting through the red tape and getting you declared alive.
treeman79 6y ago
India has a zombie party. Apparently corruption is so bad you bribe a government official get someone declared dead. There is no recourse for coming back to life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_Dead_People https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of... On a more local front, a friends social security card lists him as female. After a months effort he finally gave up on correcting it. Heck my owns wife’s birthday is wrong. By a few days. We inquired about it and were told to just go with it. Multiple years of effort would be required to fix it.
- maccard 6y ago
  My surname has two common spellings, and I've learned that it's easier to just accept the misspellings, as I have valid govt id with both spellings on it (my drivers license says one, my passport says the other). I've tried to fix it repeatedly but never managed to...
  - pc86 6y ago
    How do you decide which one to use when? I mean for all intents and purposes you basically have two legal names, right?
    - rzzzt 6y ago
      A strange superpower!
    - hobs 6y ago
      Whatever I want - because I have multiple documented uses pretty much just everyone is ok with it - its also clear that the multiple spellings (in my case) are from an Ellis Island-esque change to the name.
      - baxtr 6y ago
        Do you also happen to have two HN usernames?!
pizlonator 6y ago
Witcher 3 told me what to do: buy flowers for the receptionist and then have a fist fight with the bank’s proprietor.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  That works only if you need to get the money from account. If you need for something more W3 has no advice on that.
cortesoft 6y ago
I like how the final suggestion is to hire an attorney... going to be hard to do that with all your credit and bank accounts frozen. Sounds a lot like the ISP help that tells you to fill out a form online if your internet is out...
qppo 6y ago
> Automation is not a good thing when it comes to credit reporting I only agree in the sense that there are no good things when it comes to consumer credit reporting in the United States. This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process. There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync. Someone has to verify that the person is in fact alive. And not, for example, their meth addicted grandson trying to get their social security checks. The difficulty isn't in setting the flag but in proving that the flag should be set.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    There should be no flag, it should be a direct reference to a document proving a person is deceased.
  - qppo 6y ago
    I get that, but the related issues are all from multiple independent parties trying to prove it without incentives to be accurate.
- wyattpeak 6y ago
  > This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process I've seen this pattern fail too many times to take it seriously anymore. Programmers (myself included) tend to rather drastically underestimate the likelihood that data can end up in an error state. Humans make more mistakes, to be sure, but they can also sensibly correct mistakes when they discover them (or have them reported). Automated systems make fewer errors but once they do, the problem can be nigh irresolvable. Just look at the endless trouble we read about every few weeks from people who get their Google accounts suspended. Those people are suspended incorrectly by automated systems, and the widely-responded best recourse is to be well-enough connected to be able to get a human who works for Google to bat for you. Machines are great for increasing scale, but they are terrible for handling edge cases. If edge cases are important to your system, you need humans deeply involved.
jgeada 6y ago
It would be great if banks and other financial institutions had to follow libel laws. Why isn't a bank stating that you're dead when you're clearly not a clear case of libel? In a similar manner, most cases of what is called "identity theft" are really just bank libel: a bank mistaking you for someone else and making false statements about your credit worthiness or reassigning your assets.
- ghouse 6y ago
  And if you've had your identity stolen, the banks are the victim of that crime. You become the victim not from the thief's actions, but the actions of the banks and other institutions that were swindled by the criminal.
  - jgeada 6y ago
    It is the bank's job to be doing due diligence and validating identities and authentication and authorizations(1), that is why they charge us for the privilege of keeping our money. They just figured it is cheaper to skip that validation and attempt to extort you for their losses caused by their incompetence. In the US banks have managed to pass laws so they're entitled only to upsides of risk taking but pass on all downsides to customers and the public. (1) standard security protocol stuff: - identity: I am person X - authentication: I prove that the person claiming to be X is actually X (in the US, this step is almost always skipped because, hey, they lobby government and you don't) - authorization: the person that has been confirmed to be X has permissions to do the task they're attempting to do
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      No bank has ever charged me to hold my money. I'm 64 and lived the first half of my life in England and since then in Norway. The only charges I have ever paid were for borrowing money. Is it that the UK and Norway are unusual in not charging or is it the US that is unusual in charging?
      - franga2000 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TheDong 6y ago
On the subject of people being declared dead, there's a good defcon talk about abusing how easy it is to declare someone dead. "Chris Rock - I Will Kill You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs
mdaniels5757 6y ago
Probably easier to die than to fix it...

82 points by catacombs 6y ago

This reminds me of an old (apocryphal?) story about someone who ended up mailing back a bunch of misaddressed email with "DECEASED" on it and causing major issues for someone. I cannot remember where I read this first.

hyperman1 6y ago
After buying our house, we kept getting important official mail from some governemental org, concerning not the previous owner, but some completely different guy, we dont even know who. We always sent it back noting wrong address, and they kept sending it right back to us. We started to get 4 or 5 of these letters each week. One day I got sick of it and wrote 'Has been swallowed alive by crocodile' on one of these. Someone took notice, presumably, as the mail stopped.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

My somewhat spotty knowledge of law in an alternate universe spun from merging film noir and the Marx brothers tells me that a dead man can't be convicted of bank robbery.

Verdex 6y ago
It's something that sounds like a great twist in a drama. The bad guy looks on in horror as he realizes that the people who he's been maliciously declaring dead so that he can steal from them are also immune from legal consequences from taking revenge. Of course in real life I bet they "realize" you're alive all of a sudden. Which does make me wonder if that's not a legitimate way to "come back to life". Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Or are they going to do the leg work to declare you alive? Or for that matter, maybe you can just turn yourself into the IRS for evading taxes. Would that make things better or worse?
- msla 6y ago
  I think you're assuming the system has more consistency than it does. That is, there's no inherent reason the system must have a consistent view of you as alive or dead, so the reasonable conclusion is that it won't, so you'll be alive to the parts of it responsible for punishing you, but dead to the parts of it you want to be alive to. After all, the jail won't burn down because it's holding a person some government database considers to be dead.
  - Verdex 6y ago
    Yeah, this is a good point. However, I'm wondering if you can't bring things into alignment. Like, if the IRS wants to get money from you, then all of your financial parts of you need to be considered alive. And maybe that's good enough. Or maybe you could commit libel or slander or copyright infringement such that people will want to sue you for damages, but you're not legally able to lose money because you can't legally hold money. And from that perspective ... maybe people could pay you to commit slander or copy right infringement and then you can live off of that money until someone shows up who is willing to do the leg work to bring you financially back from the dead so that they can successfully sue you for damages. Really this is more of a thought experiment though. Like, obviously the government could bring you back if they really wanted to. It's just that they don't really want to because it's too much work for somebody. And it's sad that there probably does exist a crime/civil violation that you could commit such that suddenly it's worth someone's effort to bring you back.
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      This train of thought reminds me of the plot of The Unincorporated Man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Maybe they do like the movie Brazil when Jill was legally dead.
protomyth 6y ago
Prosecutors are remarkably capable of cutting through the red tape and getting you declared alive.

treeman79 6y ago

India has a zombie party. Apparently corruption is so bad you bribe a government official get someone declared dead. There is no recourse for coming back to life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_Dead_People https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of... On a more local front, a friends social security card lists him as female. After a months effort he finally gave up on correcting it. Heck my owns wife’s birthday is wrong. By a few days. We inquired about it and were told to just go with it. Multiple years of effort would be required to fix it.

maccard 6y ago
My surname has two common spellings, and I've learned that it's easier to just accept the misspellings, as I have valid govt id with both spellings on it (my drivers license says one, my passport says the other). I've tried to fix it repeatedly but never managed to...
- pc86 6y ago
  How do you decide which one to use when? I mean for all intents and purposes you basically have two legal names, right?
  - rzzzt 6y ago
    A strange superpower!
  - hobs 6y ago
    Whatever I want - because I have multiple documented uses pretty much just everyone is ok with it - its also clear that the multiple spellings (in my case) are from an Ellis Island-esque change to the name.
    - baxtr 6y ago
      Do you also happen to have two HN usernames?!

pizlonator 6y ago

Witcher 3 told me what to do: buy flowers for the receptionist and then have a fist fight with the bank’s proprietor.

unnouinceput 6y ago
That works only if you need to get the money from account. If you need for something more W3 has no advice on that.

cortesoft 6y ago

I like how the final suggestion is to hire an attorney... going to be hard to do that with all your credit and bank accounts frozen. Sounds a lot like the ISP help that tells you to fill out a form online if your internet is out...

qppo 6y ago

> Automation is not a good thing when it comes to credit reporting I only agree in the sense that there are no good things when it comes to consumer credit reporting in the United States. This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process. There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync.

marcinzm 6y ago
>There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync. Someone has to verify that the person is in fact alive. And not, for example, their meth addicted grandson trying to get their social security checks. The difficulty isn't in setting the flag but in proving that the flag should be set.
- xwdv 6y ago
  There should be no flag, it should be a direct reference to a document proving a person is deceased.
- qppo 6y ago
  I get that, but the related issues are all from multiple independent parties trying to prove it without incentives to be accurate.
wyattpeak 6y ago
> This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process I've seen this pattern fail too many times to take it seriously anymore. Programmers (myself included) tend to rather drastically underestimate the likelihood that data can end up in an error state. Humans make more mistakes, to be sure, but they can also sensibly correct mistakes when they discover them (or have them reported). Automated systems make fewer errors but once they do, the problem can be nigh irresolvable. Just look at the endless trouble we read about every few weeks from people who get their Google accounts suspended. Those people are suspended incorrectly by automated systems, and the widely-responded best recourse is to be well-enough connected to be able to get a human who works for Google to bat for you. Machines are great for increasing scale, but they are terrible for handling edge cases. If edge cases are important to your system, you need humans deeply involved.

jgeada 6y ago

It would be great if banks and other financial institutions had to follow libel laws. Why isn't a bank stating that you're dead when you're clearly not a clear case of libel? In a similar manner, most cases of what is called "identity theft" are really just bank libel: a bank mistaking you for someone else and making false statements about your credit worthiness or reassigning your assets.

ghouse 6y ago
And if you've had your identity stolen, the banks are the victim of that crime. You become the victim not from the thief's actions, but the actions of the banks and other institutions that were swindled by the criminal.
- jgeada 6y ago
  It is the bank's job to be doing due diligence and validating identities and authentication and authorizations(1), that is why they charge us for the privilege of keeping our money. They just figured it is cheaper to skip that validation and attempt to extort you for their losses caused by their incompetence. In the US banks have managed to pass laws so they're entitled only to upsides of risk taking but pass on all downsides to customers and the public. (1) standard security protocol stuff: - identity: I am person X - authentication: I prove that the person claiming to be X is actually X (in the US, this step is almost always skipped because, hey, they lobby government and you don't) - authorization: the person that has been confirmed to be X has permissions to do the task they're attempting to do
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    No bank has ever charged me to hold my money. I'm 64 and lived the first half of my life in England and since then in Norway. The only charges I have ever paid were for borrowing money. Is it that the UK and Norway are unusual in not charging or is it the US that is unusual in charging?
    - franga2000 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TheDong 6y ago

On the subject of people being declared dead, there's a good defcon talk about abusing how easy it is to declare someone dead. "Chris Rock - I Will Kill You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs

mdaniels5757 6y ago

Probably easier to die than to fix it...