Deceased-identity fraud lives in the gap between the date of death and the date the data catches up. We collect decedent records directly from source jurisdictions in all 50 states and publish daily, so you can decline the application, freeze the account or hold the payment while it still matters.
Contracted access for institutions with a documented permissible business purpose.
The federal Death Master File sits at the end of a long reporting chain. A death is registered locally, moves through state processing, is reported to the Social Security Administration, then processed and distributed. By the time it reaches your screening vendor, the identity has usually been exploitable for weeks.
Illustrative comparison based on typical publication lag. Actual timing varies by jurisdiction.
Speed is the product. Everything else exists to make that speed usable inside a regulated decision process.
We ingest decedent records directly at the source, which means a death typically appears in our index within a week. Most national files take one to three months to reflect the same event, and that gap is exactly where fraud happens.
Fraud rings harvest the identities of recently deceased Americans to open credit cards, claim benefits, secure employment and drain accounts. Screening against a current deceased index closes that window before a loss is booked.
A single authenticated POST returns a deterministic match verdict, confidence score and date of death. JSON in, JSON out. Most teams are live in a day, with sandbox keys available immediately.
Upload an entire customer, member or policyholder file and get a scored deceased-match report back. Ideal for quarterly portfolio hygiene, escheatment reviews and pre-audit clean-up.
Matching runs on name, date of birth, SSN and last known address with a transparent confidence score on every hit, so your analysts know exactly why a record matched before they action it.
Every verification is logged with a timestamp, the matching criteria used and the source classification, giving you the documentation your compliance, audit and regulatory reviewers ask for.
Post the name, date of birth and any combination of SSN or last known address to our verification endpoint, or upload a batch file through the dashboard.
The identity is scored against our continuously refreshed nationwide deceased index, built from source records rather than downstream aggregators.
You receive a clear deceased / not-found verdict, a confidence score, the date of death where available and a reference ID you can store for audit.
Block the application, freeze the account, pause the benefit payment or route to manual review, all before funds move and while recovery is still possible.
No ingestion pipeline, no matching engine, no flat-file processing to maintain. Post an identity, get a scored verdict back in under a third of a second.
{
"referenceId": "vd_9f31c0a7be2d",
"status": "deceased",
"confidence": 0.98,
"dateOfDeath": "2026-06-19",
"matchedFields": ["lastName", "dateOfBirth", "ssn", "state"],
"recordAgeInDays": 6,
"source": "state_vital_record",
"verifiedAt": "2026-06-25T14:22:08Z"
}The mechanics of deceased-identity exposure differ by sector. Pick yours to see the specific workflow, integration point and measurable outcome.
If your current deceased screening is built on the DMF, this is what you are trading away.
TLS 1.2+ in transit and encryption at rest. We never resell the identities you submit.
Access is contracted to vetted institutions with a documented permissible business purpose.
Configurable submission retention windows so the product fits your data-governance policy.
Enterprise accounts get a named engineer through sandbox, certification and go-live.
Death verification is the process of confirming whether a given identity belongs to someone who has died. Timing is the entire problem. Fraud committed with a deceased person's identity is concentrated in the first weeks after death, because that is when the identity still looks completely legitimate to every automated check. Our index typically reflects a death within about seven days, while the federal files most organizations rely on commonly take one to three months. That gap is where the losses occur.
The Death Master File is a downstream product. A death must be registered, processed and then propagated into the file before subscribers see it, and the public version also excludes records that states protect. We collect decedent records directly from source jurisdictions across all fifty states and publish daily, which removes several links from that chain and typically compresses availability from months to about a week.
Institutions that carry real financial or compliance exposure when a deceased identity goes undetected: banks and credit unions, lenders and card issuers, insurance carriers, pension and retirement plans, government benefit agencies, healthcare payers and providers, employers and background screening firms, and debt collection agencies. Access is contracted to organizations with a documented permissible business purpose.
Both, and most customers use both. A real-time REST endpoint handles inline checks during onboarding, underwriting or claim intake with a median response under 300 milliseconds. Batch verification accepts up to 10,000 identities per request for portfolio sweeps. There is also a dashboard for manual lookups and file uploads, plus webhook-based continuous monitoring for enrolled portfolios.
Name and date of birth are the minimum. Adding a Social Security number raises confidence substantially, and a last known address helps disambiguate common names. Every response returns a confidence score plus the specific fields that matched, so you can set different action thresholds for different risk levels rather than treating all matches identically.
Matching is deterministic and every result carries a transparent confidence score with a matched-field breakdown. The recommended pattern is to auto-action only high-confidence matches and route everything below your threshold to human review. For irreversible actions such as terminating a benefit, we recommend holding rather than terminating on first match and confirming before the change is made permanent.
Most engineering teams complete the integration in about a day. It is a single authenticated POST with a JSON body and a JSON response. We issue sandbox credentials with deterministic test identities up front, so your team can build and certify the full flow, including deceased, not-found and low-confidence paths, before contracting is finalized.
Submissions are encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 or higher and encrypted at rest. We do not resell the identities you submit to us. Retention windows for submitted data are configurable so the integration can be aligned with your own data-governance policy, and specifics are agreed during contracting.
Pricing is volume-based and structured around your expected verification throughput, with separate tiers for real-time API calls, batch screening and continuous monitoring. Enterprise agreements include named integration support. Contact our team with your use case and expected volume for a quote.
Verify Deceased is a LeadCruncher product. LeadCruncher operates nationwide data infrastructure covering more than 160 million US properties with daily updates, and Verify Deceased applies that same source-level collection and daily-refresh discipline to decedent records for identity verification.
Tell us your use case and expected volume. We will issue sandbox credentials so your team can build and certify the integration before any commercial terms are agreed.
