Credit Taken Out in a Dead Person's Name

If someone took out credit in your dead mother's name, what you do first is separate two things that look identical in the post. A credit agreement dated before she died may be a genuine debt of her estate. A credit agreement dated after she died is not a debt at all. She could not have entered into it. It is fraud, the estate does not pay it, and your job is to prove the date rather than to argue about the money.

That distinction is the whole of the answer, and it is worth holding on to when a demand lands with her name on it. You are not negotiating a debt down. You are telling a lender that its customer was already dead when its account was opened, and asking it to remove the agreement and the search that sits behind it.

The second thing to know is that nothing in the death registration process stops this happening. Registering the death, using Tell Us Once and taking out a grant of probate tell government departments a great deal and tell lenders almost nothing. Until you notify the credit reference agencies yourself, her identity is still, as far as any lender's checks are concerned, live and creditworthy.

Why an account opened after her death is not her debt

A credit agreement is a contract. A contract needs two parties capable of making it. A person who has died cannot sign, cannot consent and cannot be bound, so an agreement purportedly made in her name after the date of death has no legal existence as far as she and her estate are concerned. The lender has lent money to a criminal who used her details. That is the lender's loss, not the estate's liability.

This matters practically because it changes the tone of your correspondence. You do not have to prove the estate cannot afford it, or ask for the balance to be written off as a gesture. You state the date of death, you enclose the certificate, and you ask for the account to be closed as fraudulent and for any record of it to be removed from her file.

There is a variant worth naming, because families miss it. Fraud on an existing account — her card used in the weeks after she died, a payment taken from her account — is theft from the estate rather than a new agreement. The bank should investigate and refund the estate, and you should report it the same way. Either way, the money is not owed by anyone at the funeral.

How the fraud actually happens

Deceased identity fraud, sometimes called ghosting, works because a dead person's details keep circulating while nobody is checking them. There is no single dramatic breach involved. There are ordinary sources, and criminals use several at once.

• Public death notices. Funeral notices and obituaries often print a full name, an age, a home address and family names. That is most of an identity in one paragraph.
• The public probate record. Grants of representation are a matter of public record and can be searched by anyone, which confirms both the death and who is dealing with the estate.
• Post at an empty house. A property standing empty while the estate is sorted out is a delivery address nobody is checking. Statements, replacement cards and welcome packs all land unopened.
• Old paperwork. House clearances, skips and unshredded files supply account numbers, dates of birth and signatures.
• Existing data. Details already exposed in earlier data breaches gain value once the person is dead, because nobody is watching the file.

Two practical conclusions follow. Keep the death notice short and vague about dates of birth and addresses. And redirect the post from the property early, using Royal Mail's special redirection service for a deceased person, which requires proof rather than the deceased's signature.

The notifications that actually stop it

This is the part that does the work, and the order matters less than doing all of it within the first few weeks.

The three credit reference agencies. Experian, Equifax and TransUnion each hold a separate file, and a lender may check any one of them. Each has a bereavement process that flags the file as deceased so that new applications are refused or referred. Notify all three. Notifying one does not notify the others.

The Death Notification Service. A free service that lets you tell a number of banks and building societies about a death in a single submission. It does not cover every firm, so make a list of any lender it does not include and write to them directly.

Cifas. The UK's fraud prevention service operates a protective registration that places a warning against a set of details, so that member firms carry out extra checks before opening an account. Ask about registering the deceased's details, and about your own if they have also been exposed.

The Bereavement Register and the Mailing Preference Service. These cut marketing mail, which sounds cosmetic. It is not: pre-approved credit offers arriving at an empty house are exactly what a fraudster wants to find.

Tell Us Once. Use it, but understand its limits. Tell Us Once notifies government departments — the DWP, HMRC, DVLA, the Passport Office and the local council. It does not notify banks, lenders or credit reference agencies.

While you are working through this, deal with the accounts that were genuine as well. Loans, cards and mortgages in her sole name need to be told formally, and the timing questions around those are covered in our guides to how long a mortgage can stay in a dead person's name and to share certificates and dividend cheques still arriving in a dead name.

How to find out what has already been opened

Do not wait for the letters. By the time a demand arrives, the account may be months old and already sold to a debt purchaser.

Ask each of the three agencies for a copy of the deceased's credit file through its bereavement team, supplying the death certificate and evidence that you are the executor or administrator. Read the file line by line and mark anything with an opening date after the date of death. Those are your fraud cases. Anything dated before it belongs in the ordinary estate accounts.

Then look at the physical evidence. Collect every piece of post from the address, including items that look like marketing. Check her email account if you have lawful access to it, for account confirmations. Check whether a mobile contract, a catalogue account or a buy-now-pay-later agreement has appeared, since those are opened faster and with lighter checks than a bank loan.

Keep a single log: account, lender, date opened, date you wrote, what they said. You will need it, because these cases are resolved by paperwork and persistence rather than by one decisive phone call. The pattern of chasing letters that keeps going after a death is common enough that we have covered it separately in what to do when debt letters keep arriving for a dead parent.

Getting a fraudulent account removed

Report the fraud first, so that you have a reference number before you start writing. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland that means Action Fraud, the national reporting centre. In Scotland, report it directly to Police Scotland instead, because Action Fraud does not cover Scotland.

Then write to each lender. Keep it short and factual, and include the following:

• Her full name, address and date of death, with a certified copy of the death certificate.
• Your authority to act — the grant of probate or confirmation if you have it, or evidence that you are dealing with the estate if it has not been issued yet.
• The account number and the date the agreement was made, and the plain statement that she had died before that date and therefore cannot have entered into it.
• The crime reference number.
• What you want: the account closed, no further contact about payment, the credit search and account record removed from her file, and written confirmation of all of it.

Send it by a method that gives you proof of delivery and keep a copy. If the account has already been sold on, write to the debt purchaser as well as the original lender, because the two do not always talk to each other.

One rule, without exception: do not make a payment. Not a token payment, not a small settlement to end the hassle. Paying anything towards a fraudulent account muddies the evidence and can be treated as an acknowledgement that the account is real.

If a lender or debt collector will not let go

Most firms accept this quickly once they see a death certificate that pre-dates their own agreement. Some do not, usually because the file is being worked by an automated collections process rather than a human.

At that point, make a formal complaint in writing and say that you are complaining. A regulated firm has to investigate and give you a final response within eight weeks. If it refuses, or the eight weeks passes without one, you can take the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which accepts complaints brought by the personal representative of someone who has died and costs nothing to use. Refer it within six months of the final response.

Data protection is a narrower tool than people expect here. UK data protection law protects living individuals, so the deceased's own file is not something you can complain to the regulator about in the same way. Where the fraud has contaminated your credit file — because you shared an address, or were financially associated through a joint account — you have your own rights, and the Information Commissioner's Office can look at inaccurate personal data held about you.

If a genuine creditor of the estate surfaces during all this, and money has already been paid out to the family, that is a different problem with its own rules. We have set it out in what to do when a creditor writes after the estate has been distributed.

Protecting the rest of the family

A fraud in one household member's name has a way of spreading to the others, and the mechanism is usually financial association. If your mother held a joint account or joint borrowing with your father, the agencies link their files, and a lender assessing him will see entries from hers.

Two steps are worth taking. Close or convert joint accounts formally rather than simply stopping using them, and once they are settled, ask each agency for a notice of disassociation so the link between the two files is broken. Then check your own file and your father's for anything unfamiliar, because the same details harvested at the same address are usually tried more than once.

It is also worth checking the file of anyone at the same address whose identity is easy to use: an adult child registered on the electoral roll there, or an elderly relative with few active accounts. Thin files are attractive precisely because nobody looks at them.

None of this is an insurance problem, and we are not going to pretend it is. But there is one honest connection worth drawing. The families who cope best with the months of paperwork after a death are the ones with money available quickly — not because it makes the fraud disappear, but because nobody is trying to run an estate, dispute four accounts and worry about the mortgage in the same week. A life policy written in trust pays outside the estate, which is why the money usually arrives long before probate does. If that is what you want to put in place for your own family, you can get life insurance quotes from an FCA-authorised broker. Cover for older applicants is underwritten or age-limited depending on the type, so what is available depends on your circumstances.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The credit reference agencies, the Death Notification Service, Cifas and the Financial Ombudsman Service all operate across the UK, so most of the steps above are the same wherever you live. Three things differ.

Reporting the crime. Action Fraud covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland you report fraud to Police Scotland rather than to Action Fraud.

Registering the death. In Scotland deaths are registered under Scottish rules and the estate is administered by an executor who obtains confirmation rather than a grant of probate; mygov.scot sets out the process. In Northern Ireland, Tell Us Once is not available, so the departments have to be notified individually — nidirect explains what to do after a death there.

Public records. Grants and confirmations are recorded separately in each jurisdiction, which changes where a fraudster looks but not the underlying risk.

For the wider version of this subject, including how to lock down an identity before anything has gone wrong, see our guide to ghosting and stopping identity fraud in a dead person's name, and the rest of the topic in debt, credit and finance after a death. Citizens Advice will help you with the letters if the volume becomes unmanageable.

Frequently asked questions

Is the estate liable for credit taken out after the date of death?

No. The deceased cannot have entered into an agreement after she died, so any account opened later is fraud rather than a debt of the estate. Tell the lender in writing, give the date of death with a copy of the certificate, and ask for the account to be closed and removed from her credit file.

How do I stop credit being taken out in a dead person's name?

Notify the three credit reference agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, so that the file is flagged as deceased. Use the Death Notification Service to tell participating banks, register with the Bereavement Register to cut marketing mail, and ask Cifas about a protective registration. Report the fraud to Action Fraud, or to Police Scotland in Scotland.

How do I find out whether accounts have been opened?

Ask each agency for a copy of the deceased's credit file through its bereavement team, using the death certificate and evidence that you are administering the estate. Look for any agreement dated after the death, and keep the reports, because lenders ask for evidence when you dispute an account.