Other people have mentioned this… but it’s been established in policy that the SSN of a deceased person is not PII. There are a ton of different ways to get the SSN of someone who is deceased.
They aren't "public" but if you have a good reason, the govt will let you see the list of dead people SSNs. It's one of the first things checked when you're trying to open a line of credit because it's so easy to verify.
Now I’m wondering how many other people in this thread don’t know he died (pancreatic cancer). 59 isn’t that old. And he was expecting a baby at the time, which suggests maybe they didnt think so either.
Him, probably not. His estate, however, potentially. Perhaps one could get a loan, using his SSN, and his estate gets the bill and subsequent harassment.
SSNs make terrible secrets and it's insane that you could harm a live person by knowing their SSN. I doubt that insanity stops just because you're dead.
> I doubt that insanity stops just because you're dead.
It really does stop. What can you do with someone’s SSN? Get loans, open bank accounts, receive government benefits, set up utilities, etc. It harms someone because creditors falsely believe that the SSN’s holder owes the debt, or the government believes that the SSN’s holder received benefits, etc.
People who are falsely reported as dead have a difficult time doing anything… certainly a hard time getting loans. It’s certainly going to be hard to make a claim against an estate that’s been closed for a couple years, with a debt that is dated after that person’s death.
Well, it might show if you've been reported to have died. It's possible you were reported as dead but you're still alive. It's possible you weren't reported dead but are. And it's also possible that regardless of how you were reported, the credit agency will botch the lookup and report your dead-or-alive status wrong.
Given the amount of erroneous information in credit files, I wouldn't be surprised if the above scenarios happen regularly.
But they clearly left the year visible so blocking out the AUSA's name seems dumb too as it wouldn't be hard to look up who were the AUSAs to narrow down who was named in the file.