While humorous (getting a death certificate for someone who isn't really dead) the money is in the virtual births. I don't doubt for a minute there are entrepreneurs who use that to create new identities for people or fake dependents (welfare fraud).
no the real money is fake addresses...in that a postal address is a lazy format not verified until something is sent.
It's less than humorous. Once bogus data declaring you dead works its way into the system, credit cards get shut off, accounts get closed, and you're liable to have serious problems with your bank.
Your correct, it isn't funny, but when the Social Security administration decided my wife's uncle was already dead and he needed to pay back benefits they sent, she had them talk to him on the phone, where they tried to explain to them that because he was dead he needed to payback excess benefits.
This is what happens when computer screens turn humans into robots. We need more academic studies of "irregular operations", the term used by the airline industry for any event where unpredictable real-world events intrude on planned schedules. At such times, senior human customer service agents are empowered to override computer models, with later reconciliation.
The field is called "Operations Research". I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Cook in the speaker lounge right before he gave this keynote at Velocity 2012:
Even better: You can create a death certificate for yourself, and create a birth certificate for yourself under a different name a few decades ago.
New identity, very cheaply and easily.
Well at least for virtual births, given the trend of fingerprint storage, once the real virtualized baby is of age or otherwise required to submit prints, the other identities are pretty much useless.
This pretty much doesn't happen unless you enter a specific licensed/high-risk profession or get arrested and booked for a crime.
Or not be American and travel into the US.
Germany and Croatia take your fingerprints when obtaining your ID card. The US Army iirc maintains a fingerprint collection of enlisted personnel.
Sounds like we're one sweet OS boot screen away from the movie 'Hackers'.
Lots of dead and nonexistent people vote in elections all the time. Come to think of it, this could be a reason that it is so easy to do these things.
"The Baby Harvest: How virtual babies become the future of terrorist financing and money laundering."
Terrorists are killing and selling our babies! Sounds like over-the-top far-right US political rhetoric.